


Those Flooded Fields

by Euphorion



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artificial Intelligence, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Animal Death, Body Horror, F/F, M/M, Minor Hinata Shouyou/Kozume Kenma, Minor Tsukishima Kei/Hinata Shouyo, Multi, Violence, domes, listen just, minor everyone/everyone okay just like assume everyone has a romantic friendship, there's a lot of fondness and love here OKAY, weird futuristic hunting, what tags do i even give this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2018-04-10 22:02:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 53,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4409423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euphorion/pseuds/Euphorion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Tsukishima didn’t look up from his butchery. “I wouldn’t trust you to notice an arrow in your back,” he said flatly, “or the King to pay any mind to your wellbeing at all.”</i><br/> <br/>Tell him to shut the hell up, <i>Kageyama advised,</i> and to stop calling me that.</p><p><i>“That’s dumb,” Hinata said instead. “Of course Kageyama cares about my wellbeing.”</i> Right?</p><p>Wrong, <i>Kageyama said immediately.</i></p><p>  <i>Hinata gaped at nothing, wounded.</i></p><p>  <i>Tsukishima looked over at him and raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk. “He said no, didn’t he.”</i></p><p><i>“Shut up,” Hinata said, trying not to pout. He knelt to dress his kill. </i>Jerk<i>, he said to Kageyama, who was still too busy being smug and pissed at Tsukishima by turns to pay him any mind. </i>What good’s an AI that doesn’t even have my back?</p><p>++</p><p>Post-apocalyptic but not particularly dystopian (yet) Artificial Intelligence AU where Kageyama is a voice in Hinata's head and they're still not very good at communicating. Title from Neko Case's <i>Fox Confessor Brings the Flood</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Hinata slid his left foot along the branch in front of him. The bark was rough and warm against his bare, calloused toes as he tested his weight, rocking a little from foot to foot. Below him, the two deer— _two!_ —still had their heads lowered, lipping at the short, stubby grasses of the clearing. 

There was a popping in his ears, like happened when he was so far underground he could feel the weight of the world pressing in on his brain, and the voice in his head said, _Daichi-san would tell us to wait._

It was a deep voice—a cool voice—but Hinata could hear the little tremor of excitement in it, the same excitement that made his fingers twitch against the knives at his belt.

 _I know_ , he said. It was impossible not to sound petulant when Kageyama had access to all the same emotional signals he did, but. He tried anyway.

 _Daichi-san would say bring in backup,_ Kageyama continued, his excitement growing. _Daichi-san would say that even if we get one the other will spook and we might not see it for weeks—_

 _What backup?_ Hinata demanded. The wood under his foot shifted, more the breath before a creak than the creak itself, and he immediately shifted his weight backward, withdrew his foot. _Noya-senpai’s almost an hour out by now, getting further as we sit on our asses, and Tsukishima’s not even on duty._ He blew out a breath in impatience, making the curl of red hair that had escaped his ponytail dance against his forehead. _I don’t care what he says. What do_ you _say?_

A grin—fleeting, tiny, impossible to visualize with no face to put it on, but still somehow a grin—flickered across his mind. _What the hell are you standing around for?_

Hinata grinned and slid his knives silently from their sheathes.

When they’d first started doing this Kageyama had to guide him—verbally, for lack of a better word, tell him where to be, how to aim, how to hold his arm, his elbow, his fingers in order to send his knives exactly where they needed to go. Now, their sync was good enough that they didn’t need the words—it was like Hinata’s vision blurred except for his target, which sharpened, like his muscles clicked into their correct places. He was still himself—Kageyama couldn’t take him over, like some campfire stories he’d heard of hunters who slipped too deep into sync with their AI—and he could still feel him, sitting at the back of his head, but it was kind of like there were hands shifting him, gentle pressures and little soft wordless encouragements, all within the space of an instant.

It was nice.

His first knife embedded itself in the deer’s throat, and before the thing’s corpse had hit the ground Hinata was running, not on the ground but skipping lightly from branch to branch, circling the little clearing. The second deer froze, hesitated, and then bolted—exactly where Kageyama had known it would, away from the place the knife had come from. Hinata reached the tree Kageyama had directed him to and dropped onto its back as it passed beneath him—the impact jarring his bones—nearly slid off immediately but got a hand around one of the thing’s antlers and sawed his second knife across its throat, quick and harsh. It collapsed underneath him with a gurgling kind of cry, and Hinata fell with it, rolling away before any of his limbs could get caught in its death throes.

He sat up, wiping blood from his eyes.

 _Told you_ , Kageyama said, smug.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hinata muttered, but he couldn’t stop grinning. “Now you contact Noya and Tsukishima to help us carry the meat.”

 _Don’t tell me what to do, idiot,_ said Kageyama, but he was already doing it—feathering his awareness out over the whole quadrant of the Wood they called home. They couldn’t do this between quadrants yet—the wireless signals were too weak, and the supplies they needed to improve them basically nonexistent within the Dome—but so long as Hinata’s fellow hunters were within Karasuno bounds Kageyama could contact them with ease.

 _Tsukishima’s closer,_ he said after a minute, _but Noya is very excited to hear about our success and Asahi-san says that he’s made it into a kind of race, so it’s anybody’s guess._

Tsukishima won, whether or not he knew it was a race, and stepped into the clearing just as Hinata finished sectioning the first deer. Hinata grinned at him, raising a hand in a wave. 

Tsukishima’s face was blank, and he crossed to stand weirdly close to Hinata, his eyes flickering over him.

Hinata blinked at him. “What’s up?”

Tsukishima reached out a hand and ran his thumb over Hinata’s cheekbone, then stared at the blood on his fingers for a long second. “Disgusting,” he said at last, and crossed to the other deer.

Hinata wrinkled his nose. “What the heck was that?”

“Making sure it wasn’t your blood,” Tsukishima said shortly, bending and sliding his own knife from his belt.

Hinata laughed. “You think if I was hurt Kageyama would have called you in so calmly? That I wouldn’t have said anything?”

Tsukishima didn’t look up from his butchery. “I wouldn’t trust you to notice an arrow in your back,” he said flatly, “or the King to pay any mind to your wellbeing at all.”

 _Tell him to shut the hell up,_ Kageyama advised, _and to stop calling me that._

“That’s dumb,” Hinata said instead. “Of course Kageyama cares about my wellbeing.” _Right?_

 _Wrong_ , Kageyama said immediately.

Hinata gaped at nothing, wounded.

Tsukishima looked over at him and raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk. “He said no, didn’t he.”

“Shut up,” Hinata said, trying not to pout. He knelt to dress his kill. _Jerk_ , he said to Kageyama, who was still too busy being smug and pissed at Tsukishima by turns to pay him any mind. _What good’s an AI that doesn’t even have my back_ —

Noya entered the clearing like a tiny tsunami, bursting forth from the treetops and landing in a crouch directly between them. “No way!” he shouted immediately. “No way, no way, look at all this meat!” 

Hinata straightened up, beaming, and Noya caught sight of him and was at his side in an instant. “Shouyo! You genius, you pair of geniuses, this is _amazing_!”

Hinata felt himself go red, was glad of the blood still smearing his cheeks. “Thanks, senpai. It felt so cool, the first one was so easy, it was like blam, and then I needed to get the other one, and then I did, and—“ he stopped himself, too excited to put it into words. “Yeah!”

Noya slung an arm around his shoulder and pulled him hard against his side. “You did _awesome_ ,” he muttered against his head, and then released him to gather up the rest of the meat.

When they’d gathered it all, wrapped in the clean plastic and cloth they all carried with them, they slung it into their packs and made their way home, on the ground this time. It didn’t matter if they scared anything else off; Hinata’s catch was more than their daily quota combined and all the game would have moved by the next day anyway, shifted around in their circular habitat, taken the next step in their manufactured migration patterns.

The Dome was, according to Sugawara-senpai, about 85 miles in diameter, with the Wood taking up almost 95% of that area. The rest was taken up by the walls themselves, stretching up until they faded from the wavy brown-grey of extremely thick glass to atmospheric blue, thinning as they went so that the apex of the Dome let in the sunlight unchanged without having to be open to the air outside; and by the few scattered buildings and towns that had been repurposed to bases for the hunting parties. These were divided into four quadrants, each connected to a warren of tunnels that led deep into the earth’s crust to the underground cities where the rest of earth’s survivors lived, developing new technologies to purify the poisoned air, engineering underground gardens and livestock to supplement the food provided by the hunters, and refiguring society into something that could not only subsist but thrive, a second era of human existence.

Supposedly.

The truth—revealed to Hinata and the others by Ukai and Takeda-sensei when they turned sixteen, as it had been revealed to them at the same age—was that contact had dropped off. Commands had thinned out. They still delivered the food as they were supposed it, gathering it monthly into the great elevators at the end of the tunnel under Karasuno Center, and when the doors of the elevator car opened again it was always gone, but nothing else was given, and no one ever came the other way.

Families had stopped sending their kids to the edge of the Dome to breathe the air and take their chances against the wild. The hunters who lived here now were the children of the hunters before them, an entire separate society. Hinata’s mother had been one of the last to make the journey, and she’d never really spoken about her experiences before their little happy home at the edge of the Wood. She’d never really spoken much at all. Hinata remembered her singing to him much better than he remembered her speaking, and he heard it again as they approached the outskirts of the Karasuno Center Camp—meandering, babbled, half Japanese and half the incomprehensible language that all children instinctively know and speak only with themselves.

Hinata grinned. “Natsu! Come down!”

His little sister swung herself off a branch, and Hinata moved, Kageyama guiding his hands with perfect deftness so that he matched her momentum, swinging her gently around his body once to slow her before setting her on her feet. He only realized his mistake when she gasped. “Onii-chan,” she said, “you’re all bloody! Are you hurt?”

Hinata ruffled her hair. “I’m fine, I’m fine!” He looked over her head to Tuskkishima, who was watching him. “How’s it feel to be in the same boat as my baby sister, you worrywart?”

Tsukishima raised an eyebrow at him. “She’s better company than you are,” he said and resettled his pack on his shoulder. “Come on, hurry it up.”

Hinata reached down and took Natsu’s hand, leading her through the trees. Noya stepped up other other side, laying a hand on her head. “Your brother did the work of lions today, Natsu-chan,” he said, with a grin at Hinata. “You should be very proud.”

Hinata wrinkled his nose in embarrassment as Natsu gasped, hesitated, and then asked, “what’s a lion?”

Hinata blinked and exchanged glances with Noya. “Um,” he said, “it’s like—like a big cat—?” _Kageyama, help me out!_

 _Lion_ , Kageyama began, _panthera leo, family felidae, order carnivora_ —

 _Not that stuff!_ Hinata said scornfully. _Dumbass, you know that’s not what I meant. Show me what it looked like!_

He nearly walked into a tree when Kageyama obeyed.

His mind was filled suddenly with a huge, glorious animal in living color, a big-shouldered beast with deep, wise eyes and a great mane of red-gold hair. Speed and strength sheathed in velvet softness. An overwhelming idea of _power._

“Noya,” he breathed when he’d shaken it off. “Do you really think I’m like a lion?”

Noya grinned at him. “Sure,” he said. “You’ve even got the mane.” He leaned over and shook Hinata by the head, pulling more stray strands from his ponytail so they hung around his face.

Hinata laughed and fought him off. Shifting his pack to his other shoulder, he hoisted Natsu up onto his hip. “Lions,” he said decidedly, “are the coolest animals in the _world_.”

When they’d delivered all the meat to storage and dropped Natsu home, Hinata slipped away to the baths. They were underground—one of the few still-usable rooms off the corridors that wound under the camp, the others being the command center, a few bedrooms for people who preferred cool darkness to birds and sunshine, and an ancient kitchen with an broken old oven that Hinata and Yachi used to play hide and seek in (or where Hinata would just hide, when the pressure of his eventual purpose became too much). These corridors used to connect to the set on the other side of camp where the elevators were, but a cave-in before Hinata was born meant that you had to go outside and back down to get to storage and the mysterious world beyond.

Not that anyone ever went beyond. Not and came back, anyway.

Once, he knew, there had been electric heating in the baths, making sure the water was comfortable all year long. These days, all the power they had needed to be diverted to the command center (“for AI maintenance reasons”, which had always struck Hinata as weird because he thought the whole point of plugging the AI directly into the hunter’s skin was so that it could be powered off the human pulse, but he was just a kid. He was happy to leave stuff like that to Daichi and Sugawara) so the water was cold, drawn up from deeper underground even than this echoing set of rooms. 

He stripped off his stiff, blood-soaked clothing, tugged the rest of his hair out of its stubby little ponytail, and stared at himself in the long, rusted mirror set into the tile wall. Late summer was giving way to autumn, and the perpetual sunburn spanning his shoulders, biceps and back was turning to tan and a thick peppering of freckles. The baths were lit by dim, golden lamps which ran off stored up energy from ancient solar panels at the surface, half of which were buried or disconnected or lost. Hinata pressed his forefingers over the bruises on his ribs, his hipbones, traced the long scar in his thigh, and felt Kageyama watching him the same way he was watching himself.

The way they taught you synching with an AI worked was that the program—Kageyama, in his case—had access to all of the visual and other sensory cues that you picked up, and used those in conjunction with their superior mathematical and tactical abilities to help you best make use of the situation. The idea originally was that they’d be switched off in non-stressful situations, but when the system was put into practice two things became immediately clear: 

One, the synch between hunter and AI was improved immensely the longer the AI stayed switched on and experienced the hunter’s life. Two, this was the end of the world. There were no non-stressful situations.

What they didn’t teach you was the rest of it. How AI weren’t carbon-copies, ready to be swapped and plugged in where they were needed, or even created equal. The names weren’t just for categorization purposes, they had personalities attached—personalities with strengths and weaknesses, with hunter preferences and dislikes and flaws. Whatever program had been used to create them was far from perfect, and the partnership between human and AI became that in truth rather than just in name—a partnership.

What they didn’t teach you was all the stuff you could get from your AI that wasn’t mathematical calculations or statistical data or even the scientific name of lions. The stuff you _felt_.

Hinata turned away from his reflection and slid into the nearest bath. “Kageyama,” he said, quietly, not wanting to break the weird stillness at the back of his mind but liking the echo of the room too much to talk only in his head. “How come I can feel the stuff you do?”

 _Because I’m in your head, idiot_ , Kageyama responded, but his voice was mild.

Hinata shook his head. “No,” he said, “I mean, like. Emotions, and—and stuff, I can feel when you get—“ _sad_ , he almost said, _lonely_ , knew Kageyama heard them as clearly as the words he said aloud, “—mad, and. How are you even able to get mad, I thought the point was that I get mad and you can feel that—“

 _Emotions are all electrical signals like the rest of thoughts_ , Kageyama said. _Mine are transferred to you like yours are transferred to me._

Hinata slumped down in the water until it covered him up to his eyes, liked the way it made his vision go crazy with reflected gold, liked the goosebumps on his skin. _But_ , he said, _those electric signals have to come from something, right? A, like. Brain, a meat brain and a heart and a stomach to feel squirmy and stuff. Otherwise they’d feel different. Right?_

He expected Kageyama to make fun of him—he could almost hear him snap, ‘you’re a meat brain’, but the _Stop being stupid_ , when it came, was weirdly short, the whispers of thought behind it weirdly hushed.

 _I’m not being stupid, I’m being smart._ Hinata sat up a little. “Kageyama,” he said, blowing water droplets off his lips, “what aren’t you telling me?”

There was another pause, and Kageyama said, _Asahi-san says there’s food_. The thought was accompanied by a whiff of roasted deer and sweet, herb-filled air, transferred from Noya’s head to his.

Hinata’s stomach hollowed out so fast it was painful. “Food!”

He ducked under the water, scrubbing his hands over his scalp and shoulders and chest as quickly as he could. He surfaced, slicked back his hair, and hauled himself out of the bath, one of his shoulders aching a little.

 _Took that forward roll too fast_ , Kageyama muttered, and Hinata would have bristled but he knew Kageyama meant it as a criticism of himself as much as Hinata, if not more.

“Gotta get Tanaka to teach me that cool handspring,” he replied, and rubbed himself dry with his little scrap of rough towel. He stared at his disgusting, sweat-and-blood spattered clothes. “Kageyama.”

 _You’re not putting those back on._ His AI sounded disgusted.

“No-oo,” Hinata said slowly. “But.” He looked around the empty room. “You, um, see anything else I can wear?”

Kageyama went dangerously silent. _Hinata,_ he said finally, _hit yourself in the face._

He accompanied the suggestion with the proper silent signals to make Hinata’s arm move and Hinata was so used to trusting those signals implicitly that he did it, smacking himself across the cheek with an open palm. He blinked, startled, and then grinned wide. “Okay, asshole,” he said, “you ready to do this?”

He left the baths with purpose, striding along with corridor outside with all the confidence he could muster. Kageyama hissed in his head, like he had to stay quiet for some reason. _What the hell are you doing—_

 _It’ll be just like stealth training,_ Hinata said, hunger and adrenaline from the hunt making him jittery and fearless. _It’s not far to our tree_ —

 _No way,_ Kageyama protested, _just—get someone to bring you some clothes or something, idiot—_

_Everybody’s eating,_ Hinata sent, scornful. He pressed himself against the wall at the bottom of the stairs to the surface, peering upward into the evening air. Nervousness sat low in his stomach, but he ignored it. _Unless you think you’re not good enough to warn me if anyone can see me._

 _I can only sense the other hunters, dumbass!_ Kageyama protested. _Tanaka could see you, or Sugawara-san, or—Hinata, Shimizu could see you._

He seemed to think that would scare Hinata, and on one level it kind of did—it would be embarrassing as hell for a girl to see him naked, especially a girl as beautiful as Shimizu. But—for whatever reason, it was far more nerve-wracking to have Kageyama himself see, and he couldn’t look in a mirror without that happening. After that, nothing was scary. He took a steadying breath.

 _Chicken?_ he challenged. _You think we can’t do it?_

Without waiting for Kageyama to answer, he darted up the steps.

It was quick—and only slightly painful—work to scale the first tree he came to, and then he just stayed high, swinging himself from branch to branch. The wind felt awesome against his clean skin, and from the east, toward the clearing unofficially designated as their dining area when the weather was clear, he could see thin plumes of smoke and smell the incredible sweetness of roasting meat.

He leapt from the thinning end of one long pine branch onto another, let it springboard him upward. In this, his height (and Noya’s) was an advantage. Tsukishima had to be much more careful, staying close to the trunks of trees when his hunts called for aerial work, which wasn’t often. His AI Yamaguchi was quiet (although Hinata wondered how quiet; sometimes he heard Tsukishima mutter “shut up, Yamaguchi” under his breath) and focused and determined, and Tsukishima was almost never hurt compared to his smaller teammates.

 _Tsukishima,_ Kageyama snapped, an echo of Hinata’s thoughts. _Left, ground, looking this way._

The spot where the other hunter stood blazed momentarily in Hinata’s vision, like he could see through the trees between them, and Hinata slipped in close to the trunk and edged around it, keeping as much wood as possible between himself and the other boy. The day was sliding into night, the world above him going gold-grey-blue with the sunset. Noya swore there was a moment at twilight where you could see the joints between the panels of the sky, but Hinata had never seen it. 

The wind shifted in the leaves, and if he weren’t so hungry he would be tempted to just—stay here, naked as the day he was born, secure because today, today they had enough to eat—fresh things to eat; today, no one was hurt; today, there was no threat of drought or storm or other malfunction; today, he and his little band of family were safe.

 _Hinata_ , Kageyama said quietly, waking him from his daze. He expected his AI to make fun of him for sitting still so long and risking being seen, but Kageyama said nothing else. There was a pressure at the back of Hinata’s head, not entirely familiar but not entirely new—akin to but not the same as hunger; akin to but not the same as restlessness. Yachi would probably call it longing, but Yachi was always romanticizing everything.

Suddenly all the questions he’d been distracted from by Kageyama’s mention of food came rushing back. He straightened up, checked the blaze that was Tsukishima, and slid lightly down a few branches. _Don't think you’re gonna get away with not answering me, you sneaky—_

Below him, Tanaka looked up, did a double-take, and then burst into raucous laughter. 

Hinata felt himself blush from head to toe, covering himself up as best he could. _Kageyama!!_ He screeched inside his own head.

 _You deserved it_ , Kageyama said smugly.

“H-Hinata what the _fuck_ ,” Tanaka choked when he could breathe, his eyes filled with tears.

“Shut up!” snapped Hinata. “I was taking a bath and my clothes were all bloody—“

“Oh!!” Tanaka interrupted, his eyes lighting, “I heard you guys took down two whole deer today. That’s _amazing_ , man. Knew you had it in you!”

Hinata scratched a hand through his drying hair. “Uh, haha. Yeah—“

Tanaka hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “C’mon,” he said, “I’ll help you sneak to get clothes and then we’ll head to dinner, yeah?”

Hinata grinned at him, embarrassed. “Thanks, senpai. You’re the best.”

Tanaka swelled up his chest at the honorific. “I am, aren’t I?” His face cleared suddenly like he’d had an idea, and suddenly he was stripping out of his shirt. “Solidarity!” he announced.

Hinata gaped at him. “You’re so cool!!”

They made it to his tree outpost without further incident, unless Hinata hitting his head against the wall when Tanaka launched him head-first through the door counted. All of the hunters had two homes: their childhood home, usually in the remains of a house or under the ground in the tunnels, where they spent their lives until they were old enough to properly climb and run through the treetops and where they kept what little precious stuff they had; and their outposts, carved into or built outward from the largest of the trees around the ancient town. Hinata spent a lot of time in his childhood home still because he had to take care of Natsu, but he didn’t want to risk Shimizu or Yachi being there, or Natsu blabbing to everyone that her big brother had run in buck naked at dinnertime with Tanaka at his heels.

His senpai ran back to the clearing to grab the wood he’d been gathering, and by the time he returned—sweating and set-jawed, his shoulder muscles straining but his face all cheerful determination—Hinata had shrugged himself into loose pants and a half-vest that he was pretty sure had once been his mother’s. Certainly she’d made it; she’d made a lot of their clothing, his and Natsu’s and everyone’s, making use of the hides and furs that the hunters brought back as all their pre-Dome fabrics slowly rotted away to nothing. It was orange—died with lichen she’d gathered on the closed-off steps of the deeper tunnels—and fastened at the front with little ties that were delicate in his weary fingers, finicky to tie correctly. 

He frowned down at them, and remembered the other reason he was mad. “Kageyama!” he shouted aloud, and Tanaka, waiting at the base of the tree, yelped. 

Hinata made a face and turned his voice inward. _I can’t believe you did that to me,_ he complained. _You’re such a jerk, who programmed you to be such a jerk—_

 _It was your idea, stupid,_ Kageyama pointed out testily. _I just made sure you got what you had coming._

 _I did it because I thought you had my back!_ Hinata complained, finally managing to tie his shirt, and then leapt down from his perch to join Tanaka.

The older boy greeted him with a grin. “Sort out your headmate issues?” he teased.

Hinata made a sour face at him, and Tanaka laughed. “So, as usual, no.”

 _We’re fine_ , Kageyama muttered. _Hinata, tell him we’re fine._

Hinata put a hand to his head, still making a face. _Jerk,_ he insisted. _Jerk, jerk, jerk._

“You might wanna come to some kinda peace during dinner,” Tanaka suggested, resettling the bundle of wood across his shoulders and retying his shirt around his waist. “Never part angry, that’s what I always say.” He grinned. 

Hinata stopped walking, startled.

“Good advice, Ryuu,” Tanaka said conversationally to himself. “Oh, thanks, Ryuu.” He turned when he noticed Hinata wasn’t following him anymore. “What’s up?”

“There’s an update tonight?” Hinata asked, dismayed. He hated it when they had to update the AIs, because it meant he had to take the plug from behind his ear and give it to Suga and his head was all empty of anything but his own dumb self, and nobody could ever tell him how long it would take, because the computers they had in the command center were so old and constantly breaking, and he was always paranoid that. Something would happen.

Tanaka raised his eyebrows at him. “Yeah,” he said. “Suga told you like two days ago at breakfast, weren’t you listening?”

Hinata tried to remember anything that had happened two days ago, but came up empty. He shrugged and started walking again. “Guess not.”

 _I remembered,_ Kageyama said snottily.

 _Wish you had a head so I could hit it,_ Hinata muttered at him. _Why didn’t you remind me?_

 _Why do you think I wanted to take down those deer?_ Kageyama demanded. _You think updates are weird and uncomfortable for you? I wanted to stretch my legs before I’m all cramped up for a thousand years._

_I just thought you were a dumbass who got excited about stupid stuff, _Hinata said stubbornly.__

Kageyama flared with anger in the back of his head. _YOU WERE JUST AS EXCITED, YOU STUPID—_

Hinata started laughing, and Tanaka looked sideways at him, his expression a little odd. Hinata bumped him with a shoulder. “What’s up?”

Tanaka shrugged. “Nothin’,” he said. “It’s just, sometimes it gets kinda lonely out here.”

Hinata bit his lip. “Ah, I’m sorry—“

Tanaka hit him the shoulder with a gentle fist. “Don’t, don’t,” he said. “You’re better than Noya, anyway. The way that guy gets…” He shook his head, staring at his feet as he walked. “We’ll be like. Chilling, or working, even, making new nets for Takeda’s fishing or whatever, and he’ll just go all scary-silent and stare at nothing and he’ll stay like that for hours and like.” He twitched his mouth, a little bitter. “What are he and Asahi even talking about in there? There can’t be that many strategies or whatever to discuss.”

Hinata blinked at him. “They’re friends.”

Tanaka frowned. “Yeah, but,” he said. “So’re him and me, and I’m like, a person.”

 _He doesn’t mean that,_ Hinata said to Kageyama immediately. _He’s just hurt._

 _Obviously_ , Kageyama shot back immediately, but there was something soft to it, almost grateful.

“Tanaka,” Hinata said slowly. “Why aren’t you a hunter?”

Tanaka looked at him, surprised. “What?”

“How come you never took the test, got the surgery?” Hinata asked.

Tanaka shrugged. “I don’t really like the idea of having somebody else rootin’ around in my head,” he said. “Plus, we need some people to stay behind and keep everything ship-shape around here, right? Besides.” He shuddered. “I’m really not a fan of needles.”

Hinata watched him for a minute, and then nodded.

“Why?” Tanaka asked. “You think I’m not a hunter, so I just don’t get it, huh?” His voice was mocking.

“No!” Hinata protested, and then felt bad, because it was a lie. “I mean, kind of. It’s just—it’s complicated, I don’t.” He sighed. “I’m sorry he’s been ignoring you and I know it must be hard when we clam up like that but Asahi’s—whatever he is to Noya, he’s not replacing you, okay? It’s different, it’s—“ He threw his hands up. “It’s just like, _click!_ And then there it is.”

Tanaka stared at him for a long moment and then shifted the wood off his shoulders, setting it down to stack against the trees at the edge of the clearing. “Naaahh," he said, more just noise than negation. Go on." He flicked a thumb over his shoulder. “Eat.”

Hinata wanted to linger, not liking how unresolved things felt, but his stomach was so empty it was collapsing in on itself, and so he threw Tanaka a salute and a reassuring grin and trotted off to join the others.

Most people had already eaten and moved on, but Shimizu was sitting with Natsu on the edge of one of the firepits, watching her carefully as she wielded a tiny knife, sharpening a stick to a perfect roasting point.

Natsu looked up and grinned at him when she saw him. “Onii-chan!” she exclaimed, waving the knife and the sharp stick both.

He leapt theatrically back from her, widening his eyes. “Woah, woah!” he said, and leaned in to steal the knife out of her hand. “Careful, or you’ll make me prey like dinner was!”

Natsu giggled. “You’re not prey, you’re a lion,” she said.

Hinata puffed up his chest in pride. Kageyama, not to be left out, sent him three or four rapid-fire pictures of lions making stupid-looking faces.

Replying to Kageyama with his best wordless, unimpressed grunt, Hinata hooked his hands into claws and advanced on his little sister, growling, until she shrieked with laugher and tried to hide behind Shimizu’s knees. Hinata relented, running a hand through her hair and looking up at his friend.

Shimizu was looking elsewhere, her head turned to stare across the clearing, her long, black hair swept off her neck, and Hinata’s gaze caught on the AI-port tucked behind her ear, snapped closed but empty, a little hollow space inside her skull where someone else had lived, once.

She’d never told him who, and he’d never asked. It seemed rude, despite his terrible curiosity. He told himself—again—that it wasn’t his to know.

He followed her gaze; she was staring across the clearing at Yachi, who was helping Takeda-sensei break down the roasting frame. He took a breath; there was a weird sort of sorrow in her eyes, a dullness. “Shimuzi-san,” he asked, “are you okay?”

Shimizu blinked and looked at him, and then blushed, dropping her eyes. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I’m okay.” She hesitated, and then admitted, “autumn is hard.”

Before he could think better of it, Hinata asked, “Is that when you lost—“

He cut himself off at Kageyama’s warning _Hinata,_ but it was kind of too late. Shimizu raised her eyes to his again, and for a moment she looked puzzled. “Lost—?” she asked, and then realization dawned, and she raised a hand to her ear, tucking her hair behind it and brushing her fingertips over the cap of her port in one habitual motion. “Oh,” she said. “I—something like that.” She smiled. “I’m surprised you haven’t eaten yet, Hinata-kun.”

Hinata shrugged, a little uncomfortable. He didn’t really want to admit that he hadn’t eaten because once he’d eaten dinner would be over, and after dinner he had to go see Sugawara-san and give up Kageyama for some indistinct amount of time that would definitely be too long.

He covered that thought up with a hasty breath of still-delicious-smelling air, turned his thoughts firmly to food, and hoped Kageyama hadn’t noticed.

Maybe he didn’t, because all he said was a relatively mild, _Nosy,_ Hinata, and Hinata made a face to himself as he jogged over to get food.

 _I just wanna know,_ he complained. _Maybe if I knew, I could help._

 _Couldn't_ , Kageyama said shortly.

 _How would you know?_ Hinata demanded, grabbing a plate and piling it high with deer meat and greens and little sour apples. _You don’t know anything more than I do._

Kageyama hesitated a second too long, and Hinata paused, too, his mouth stuffed full. _Do you?? ___

 _No,_ said Kageyama. 

Hinata’s mother had been especially good at embroidery, picking out beautiful floral patterns in the clothes she made for special days. Hinata used to sit in her lap and turn them over in his hands, amazed that something could be so neat and precise on the top and such a mess of colorful thread on the bottom.

That was exactly how it felt when Kageyama lied to him. His _no_ was short and precise and brooked no argument, but it was sewn all under with guilt and frustration and a lot of other weird emotion that Hinata couldn’t untangle, and Hinata frowned, chewing slower. _Stop not telling me stuff,_ he demanded.

 _No,_ said Kageyama, outright denial this time. _Stop asking._

Hinata took his food and, balancing it on the fingers of one hand, used his other hand and his legs to scramble up into the low branches of one of the trees surrounding the clearing. “Kageyamaaaa,” he complained. “Tanaka-senpai said never part angry!”

 _I’m not angry,_ Kageyama said coolly. _If you’re angry, it’s your own fault._

Hinata swung his legs in frustration. “Why are you so stubborn?”

 _Because you’re so annoying_ , Kageyama said testily. _Leave me alone._

He slunk off into whatever inaccessible bit of Hinata’s brain he occupied when he was sulking, and Hinata ate his food in frustrated silence. When he’d finished he washed his dishes and placed them back in the carts to be taken back underground with the rest of the dinner stuff, and then he sighed and went to go find Sugawara.

He was already in the command center. It was a weird, dark room, totally at odds with the world that Hinata experienced on a daily basis. He came down here as little as possible, not least because he associated it so much with having Kageyama taken away, and with the whole. Surgery in the first place. He shivered, a little, in the cool air.

Sugawara looked up from his desk. Once, this place had been equipped for upwards of twenty people, meant to have visual and auditory contact with the hunters at all times and be able to perfectly guide them in their hunts. Now almost everything was rendered useless by the lack of power; there was one functional generator in all of Karasuno. Daichi and Sugawara—or maybe Ukai and Takeda, who from Hinata’s limited understanding had been doing their job before they were—had consolidated it all into one room and mostly two desks.

“Hinata,” Sugawara said, smiling his little dimpled smile. “Hey. You ready?”

Hinata swallowed. _Kag_ —

 _I wish I could tell you but I can’t and I’m sorry, okay?_ Kageyama said, all in a rush. 

_Okay,_ said Hinata, startled.

 _So just stop asking,_ Kageyama said. _Okay?_

Hinata reached up to the port behind his ear. _Okay,_ he said, and swallowed. _See you soon, yeah?_

Kageyama sent him—feeling, without words, a little flash of something relieved and thankful and worried. Yeah, he said at last, and Hinata flipped open the cap to his port and tugged out his plug.

It was a weird feeling, like popping a knuckle if popping a knuckle meant your finger went dead afterward: a little painful, a little jarring, a lot hollow. Hinata handed Kageyama to Sugawara, flipped his port closed, and cracked his neck. He watched Sugawara plug his AI into the ports on the computer in front of him, watched him type for a moment on the clattery keyboard, and then he made a decision.

“Sugawara-senpai,” he said. “Can I ask you like. A whole bunch of questions?”

Sugawara raised his eyebrows. “Yes?” he said uncertainly.

Hinata hopped up on a filing cabinet. “Okay,” he said, “so like—how come I can feel what Kageyama’s feeling? Not like what he knows, or what he’s saying, but like, emotions and stuff, and like—sometimes the feelings of those things the way, like, a body would feel them? Like he doesn’t have a body, how does his digital brain or whatever know how to do that? Did he learn the body-feelings from other hunters before me? How would that work? And, like.” He paused to breathe.

Sugawara was staring at him, caught halfway between laughter and worry. “Hinata—“

Hinata shook his head and kept going, because he had to get it out while he knew how to say it, at least kind of. “Sometimes there’s this thing that happens where he thinks about stuff that makes no sense, like it’s too much him to be his, like—one time he remembered what sunshine felt like only it wasn’t on someone else’s face because I know what him remembering that feels like, it was too, like, close, and—“

Sugawara held up a hand. “Hinata, I—“

“—and what happened to Shimizu’s AI because I know it’s not my business but Kageyama knows and he won’t tell me!” Hinata finished in an almost-shout. 

Sugawara put a finger to his lips. “Shush, shush, okay? Calm down.” He frowned at his feet for a long time, and then, like Hinata, seemed to make a decision. He walked over to a panel in the wall and pressed a button. “Daichi, can you come in here a sec?”

There was a pause, and then a door at the back of the room opened. Daichi came through and closed it behind him, frowning. “What’s up, Suga?”

Suga made a stay-here kind of motion to Hinata and crossed the room to him, saying something in a voice too low for Hinata to hear. He reached for Kageyama to ask him to sharpen his hearing, and then remembered. Worrying his lips between his teeth he watched Daichi and Sugawara have some kind of heated, whispered fight, and then Daichi sighed and said, a little louder, “fine, but on your own head be it.”

Sugawara crossed his arms, the expression on his face one that Hinata had never seen on him before—resigned, a little bitter. “Isn’t it always?”

Daichi looked at Hinata. “Come on, then.”

Hinata jumped to his feet, his heart hammering in his chest, and skipped over to him. Daichi led him to the opposite end of the room. He walked over to one of the walls and did something with one of his hands.

With a click and a grinding sort of groan, the wall split in two, revealing a long, dark hallway. Hinata gaped, but Daichi didn’t give him time to really react, because he did something else by the wall and a light flickered on, and then he was continuing through the false wall and into the hall.

It was lined by tall, glass cylinders hooked into the floor and ceiling. Most of them were empty, hanging with wires that connected to nothing at all, but as they continued Hinata saw—figures, in a few of them, wanted to stop and stare but something kept him matching Daichi’s steps.

“Here,” Daichi said at last, stopping in front of one of the cylinders, and Hinata looked.

There was a boy in the cylinder, suspended in some kind of clear liquid. There were wires hooked into his shoulders, his wrists, his temples; tubes lead from his nose away into the ceiling. He was naked, his skin moon-pale, and his black hair lay in a jagged peak against his forehead, drifting slightly away from his skin.

The label on the cylinder said _Subject 26: T., Kageyama._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhh hi guys this is a weird one. love you!! for those of you waiting on the last polyamory fic (i know there's a lot of crossover between the two fandoms), yes, it's still coming, i just had to spill out some of these feelings first.


	2. Chapter 2

Hinata took a step back, then another. “What,” he said. “What the hell—“

Daichi stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay—“

“No it’s not!” Hinata shouted, rounding on him. “What’s wrong with him? Why is he in there? Why’s his brain in my head? Why are you telling everyone they don’t have bodies?”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Daichi said firmly. “He might be a little malnourished—it’s hard to get nutrients into them once we ran out of the original compound we were supposed to be receiving from beyond, but otherwise perfectly healthy.” He crossed his arms. “And he’s waiting,” he said.

Hinata blinked at him. “Waiting?”

Daichi nodded. “For the rest of us to save the world.” He grinned, like it was a joke.

Hinata hesitated and turned slowly back to look at the floating boy. “It’s really him?” he asked. “It’s really—Kageyama?” _My Kageyama,_ he nearly said, and felt his cheeks flame at the thought. Thank god he wasn’t here to hear it.

But—he was here. He was— _more_ here than he had ever been before, here for Hinata to look at, to. He approached the tube slowly, reaching out a hand to ghost his fingertips over the glass.

“I’ll give you a minute,” Daichi said, his gruff voice kind. “Come find us when you’re ready.”

Hinata nodded absently, but didn’t take his eyes off of Kageyama’s face. 

He didn’t really look like he was sleeping. Everybody pretended that people were still when they were asleep but Hinata had spent enough long nights staring out at the forest across the slumbering bodies of his friends, of his sister, to know the opposite. Sleeping people twitched and spoke; sleeping people snored and snorted and drooled and breathed, breathed, breathed, and—Kageyama’s chest was too still.

Hinata curled his fingers into fists, his own chest tight.

“You wanna see his heartbeat?” 

Sugawara had come in silently, stepping up to his side. Hinata—his mouth sour with panic—nodded vigorously.

Sugawara shifted something out of the wall next to the cylinder, a curved metal and plastic screen that slid around the cylinder on a horizontal track. He pulled it around so it was hovering over Kageyama’s chest. Suddenly Hinata could see, in flickering black and white, a pulsing, shifting shape—steady, rhythmic, real.

Hinata took a breath—his first, maybe, since Daichi had left him alone, so _thoroughly_ alone, with the pale, silent figure—and let it out again, calmer.

“Helps,” said Sugawara, “doesn’t it.”

Hinata nodded, because it did. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Sugawara echoed. “It always helps me, too.”

Hinata glanced sideways at him. He was watching Kageyama, his head cocked a little and his face soft, lit gold and strange from the lights above, the same gold of the baths. “Senpai,” he said, “why–why is he here, I don’t—“

Sugawara turned a little bit toward him. “He’s here because he volunteered to be,” he said simply. “The AI—the AI we have _now_ , they’re all here.” He gestured around at the other cylinders. “Asahi, Yamaguchi—Ennoshita, too, though we have no Hunter for him to partner with.” 

Hinata’s eyes went wide. “Really? Can I see?”

Sugawara started to nod, but Hinata thought better of it immediately. “Actually,” he said slowly, “I don’t—I don’t think I should see before Noya-senpai and Tsukishima do.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “It—wouldn’t feel right.”

Sugawara looked surprised, and then he smiled. “Maybe so.”

Hinata swallowed, staring at his feet. “You said they chose this. But—why?”

Sugawara raised his eyebrows and cocked his head at Kageyama. “You’ll have to ask him,” he said quietly, “once he’s back in your head.” He reached out and slid the panel that showed Kageyama’s heart back into the wall. “Come on,” he said. “You’ve had quite the day. Time to get some sleep.”

Hinata bit his lip. “But—“

Sugawara put a hand on his shoulder and gently steered him away. “Bed, Hinata,” he said. “You can come back to see him in the morning, if you like.”

+

Hinata made himself wait until afternoon. He spent the morning with Natsu, gathering the tiny grey bugs their mother used to use for red dye. They only lived in the hothouses at the edge of the camp and they had to be gathered up quick, at the moment they’d matured but before the ladybugs, wasps, and ants devoured them. 

The task was hot—that was the point of the hothouses, after all—and by the time Hinata had brought Natsu and their swarming grey jars back to his childhome he was glad to be able to slip away into the cool darkness of the command center.

There was no one there when he got there, so he wandered over to the wall and found the little hidden catch he’d seen Daichi use. He’d brought his lunch with him, and when the wall slid open he found Kageyama easily, sitting down in front of his cylinder and spreading his food out in front of him.

“You like milk, Kageyama?” he asked the echoing silence, pushing the cup forward. “You must, you’re so pale.” He shrugged shoulders that felt too thin, today. He felt too thin, and too hot, and too small. “It’s only rehydrated stuff, not real milk, but.”

He smiled up at Kageyama, at the unchanging blank of his face, and then suddenly he moved, jumping to his feet so he could pull the little panel from the wall, spin it around til it framed the right part of his chest, stared hard at the heartbeat there. 

It didn’t help. It—made it worse, somehow—it was a too-familiar shape, Hinata had cracked ribs and pulled guts and cut too similar a thing from a still-warm chest only the day before, it. He. He closed his eyes tight. “Come back already,” he muttered.

Sugawara found him there hours later, his lunch eaten, sitting with his back against the glass of Kageyama’s tube, staring upward. When Sugawara appeared he sat up a little, noted with excitement the small black plug in his hand. 

Sugawara held it out, but kept his grip on it. “He’s only in standby,” he warned, “it’ll take a while for the update to finish installing, and—“ he smacked Hinata’s hand away, “—you can only have him if you promise to go back outside.”

Hinata frowned at him. “Sugawara-senpai—“

“This isn’t you,” Sugawara said firmly. “I know it’s new, and I know you’re processing, but you have to keep being you. Go outside. Eat dinner with your friends, and when Kageyama gets back you can work it out between you. Okay?”

Hinata sighed, but held out his hand again. “Yeah.”

Sugawara handed him the plug, and Hinata flipped open his port one-handed, slipping it back into place with a little twitch of satisfaction, because even if he couldn’t talk to Kageyama again yet he felt better without the hollow ache behind his ear.

“Go on,” Sugawara said, and ushered him out the door.

+

Someone shook him awake way before he was supposed to be shaken awake, and it took him a minute to free himself of the cobweb-dreams that clung to the corners of his mind. When he succeeded he saw it was Noya—not, somehow, as his brain had insisted, the boy in the tube who he _still_ couldn’t quite believe was Kageyama—who was crouched in the entrance to his outpost, his eyes bright and complicated.

“Is it true?”

Hinata sat up, blinking. “Is what—“

“I saw you leave the command center,” Noya said. “I asked Asahi what you were doing and he said he didn’t know but—“ he stopped, swallowed reflexively. “He—he was lying.”

Hinata ran a hand through his hair. “Noya—“

“Collapsed under pressure, though,” Noya said, cutting him off. “Always does.” His voice—unfailingly fond, unfailingly _awed_ whenever he talked about his AI—was weirdly dull. “Hinata,” he said, “are they,” and then, “were they human?”

Hinata swallowed hard. “Yeah,” he said. “Daichi and Suga have—there’s this whole room, with. Their bodies.”

Noya twitched, and stared down at his own hands. “Take me there,” he said.

His voice commanding in a way Hinata had never heard it, and when Hinata shifted to try and see his face better he turned it further away. Hinata tried to rub the grit from his eyes but only succeeded in making them ache. “Okay, but. In the morning,” he said. “They have to let us in, there’s this whole process.”

Noya nodded abruptly, and when he raised his chin his eyes snapped to Hinata’s so fast it felt tangible, mechanical. Click. “First thing, okay? I need—“ he cut himself off, and went back to working his lower lip between his teeth, his eyes desperate.

Hinata smiled at him as reassuringly as he could. “Get some sleep, senpai,” he said. “First thing, I promise.”

Noya nodded again—the ‘senpai' that usually made him beam having no effect at all— and, his movements still stiff, swung himself down and away from Hinata’s quarters. 

Hinata flopped back against his blankets and stared at the dark.

+

Daichi scrubbed a hand across his face. “Hinata,” he said, “it’s _very_ early.”

Hinata bounced on his toes, cold in the subterranean air. “I know,” he said, “um, I—told? Noya?” He bit his lip. “Well actually he saw me leaving and then Asahi told him, but it was my fault, because—“

“I know they have bodies,” Noya cut in, stepping up and around him. “C’mon, let’s go get Suga-senpai. You’re taking me to see him.”

Daichi winced. “Uh,” he said, “Suga’s—“

“It’s okay, Dai,” came Suga’s sleepy voice from the darkness of Daichi’s room. “I’m awake.”

“Oh,” said Daichi, and there was color high in his cheeks. “Good.”

“Just let me put on some pants and we’ll go,” Sugawara called, his voice gone just a little bit wicked, and Daichi’s blush darkened, although with embarrassment or anger Hinata wasn’t sure.

 _Oh my god,_ he said to Kageyama, his own cheeks heating. _Oh my god—_

He stopped, because there was no answering voice. His mental call just went—flat, like it had before he’d become a hunter, when he’d been. Alone. He shook himself as Sugawara—shirtless, his hair tousled and his eyes tired—slipped around Daichi with a grin. “So,” he said, “shall we?”

Daichi rubbed the back of his neck. “Aahh,” he sighed, somehow sounding simultaneously exasperated, mortified, and desperately fond. “Right.” He led the way down the corridor.

Maybe Kageyama couldn’t freak out about Daichi and Suga with him, but Noya could. Hinata jogged up to walk next to him and jabbed an elbow into his ribs. “Daichi and Sugawara!” he hissed. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sugawara’s shoulders twitch in laughter.

Noya slid his eyes sideways to him for a second and then continued to look forward. “Duh,” he said shortly. “You didn’t know?”

Hinata frowned at him, at the set intensity of his face. “I’m always the last person to hear about anything,” he complained.

Noya flashed him a smile, but it was empty. “First person to hear about this,” he pointed out, and sped up to walk with their scientists, leaving Hinata weirded out and worried in his wake.

When they got to the command center Sugawara split off from them to go to his desk, while Daichi led them over to the wall again. 

Asahi’s cylinder was closer than Kageyama’s—was the first one that was occupied, actually, and when Daichi flicked on the lights Noya—slowed, and stopped.

Hinata stopped, too, staring.

Asahi was—tall. Tall and broad and muscular and he looked older, maybe. His hair was long and brown and pulled back from his broad, kind face, leaving it open and vulnerable. He was as still as Kageyama was, the same tubes and wires leading away from his body.

Noya started moving again, walking up to the cylinder softly, slowly, like it was prey he was trying not to spook, like it was a mirage and he was waiting for the moment it vanished.

He pressed his forehead and his palms to the glass, his eyes slipping closed, his lips moving. Hinata hung back, wanting to give him his space, but he was _fiercely_ curious, and came as close as he dared while still leaving a respectful bubble, his ears straining.

Maybe whatever standby-version of Kageyama remained in his head knew, and did the thing he sometimes did during hunts, just—augmenting a little, increasing the range of Hinata’s hearing and sharpening the sounds he did hear, because suddenly Noya’s murmuring became clear as day.

“Coward,” he spat against the glass, low and furious, his lips contorted. “Coward, coward, coward, _coward_ —“

“Hey,” said Hinata, shocked. “Noya—“ He started forward, reaching out to touch Noya’s shoulder.

“Get off me,” Noya snapped, twisting away from him, his eyes never leaving Asahi’s still face. When Hinata just grabbed him harder, he growled, “Let go, Hinata—“

“Nishinoya, calm down!” Daichi called, trotting down the steps from the platform where he and Sugawara had their desks, and Noya went limp so suddenly he was like deadweight in Hinata’s arms. Daichi was already scowling when he reached them. “What’s going on with you two? We didn’t show you this so you could freak out and have a goddamn fistfight in the middle of a lab full of delicate equipment!“

Noya straightened a little, and Hinata set him back on his feet with a baffled pat on the shoulder. “Right,” Noya said dully. “Sorry.”

He didn’t look at Asahi again, just turned on his heel, heading toward the entrance. 

“Hey,” Hinata protested, “Noya…”

Noya just shook his head and kept walking.

Hinata bit his lip, looking after him. “Why, um. Why did you show us? If, if it’s been secret for so long.”

Daichi glanced up at the upper deck, where Hinata could see Sugawara, his pale head bent over his desk, and then looked back at Hinata. “You wouldn’t shut up about where AI came from,” he said, shrugging, and Hinata didn’t need the whisper in his head to know it was only a half-truth. “We showed you, and you showed him.” He turned to look at the door Noya had closed behind him. “Maybe better not to spread it further, hm?”

Hinata blinked at him. “You don’t want Tsukishima to know?”

Daichi sighed. “His AI, Yamaguchi, he’s—a special case. Better not to give him false hope.”

Hinata snorted at the idea of Tsuki being hopeful about anything, and then frowned. “Wait, does that mean Noya and me—we have, like, real, actual, not-false hope?” 

Daichi froze. “I didn’t say that—“

Hinata bounced on the balls of his feet, suddenly energized. “But you did though,” he said, “not, like, directly, but you made it sound like—“

“Hinata—“

“Senpai,” Hinata asked, excitement making his heart do somersaults in his chest, “can they come _back?_ Be, be people again?”

He tried to imagine the boy in the case, with his long-lashed eyes and thin hands and pointy chin, up and walking around. Tried to imagine him with Kageyama’s voice, laughing at him with Kageyama’s quiet laugh. It was kinda impossible. He couldn’t _wait_ to see it for real.

Daichi stared at him for a long moment, and then he said, “Have you ever been sent to Aobajosai?”

Hinata pouted at the change of subject, and then shook his head. 

“Suga,” Daichi called, and Hinata saw Sugawara lift his head. “We got any promising game between here and Seijou?”

Suga laughed. “The whole Wood’s between here and Seijou, Dai,” he called back, but pulled up the map anyway. It flickered against the wall of the command room, a patch of endlessly cascading green and blue and brown lines that had maybe once been legible to everyone before half their technology broke but were now totally incomprehensible to everyone but Daichi and Sugawara. The latter hummed a little and then called, “There’s a flock of geese that usually congregate around that north-north-east lake this month.”

Hinata squinted at the map. “There’s a lake on there somewhere?”

Daichi laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll make sure Kageyama has the coordinates by the time he’s back in your head. Remember not to thin the flock too much.”

Hinata made a face at him. “I know, I know, I’ll leave anything that looks young enough to be better eating next month.”

The Wood was entirely cut off from the outside world, an enclosed forest created to serve as a farm for hundreds, if not thousands of people—Hinata knew there were other domes, elsewhere, or at least knew that that had been the plan, once—so there had to be enough animals within the circumscribed miles to meet food demands, even as they were constantly being hunted. This Dome had started as a research facility, figuring out ways to accelerate the growth of animals, and they’d succeeded. Birds hatched, fledged, and mated again within the course of a few weeks; the deer Hinata and Kageyama took down the day before would have been old, stringy and tough in a few months.

Daichi’s hand was still on his shoulder. Hinata couldn’t tell whether it was threat or reassurance—with Daichi, the two were almost interchangeable. “Once you get there, find Oikawa Tooru and ask him about AI’s ‘coming back’, as you called it.”

Hinata wrinkled his brows. “Um, okay? Why can’t you just tell me?”

Daichi shook his head. “Trust me, you want to hear it from him.” He met Hinata’s eyes. “When you get back, we’ll tell you the rest.”

He lifted his hand and turned away, starting back up the steps to rejoin Sugawara.

Hinata ran his eyes over Asahi’s face, over Kageyama’s (his brain still kind of went bzzt!! at that), over the darkened cases beyond. He took a breath, released it, and headed for the door. He should really find Noya, make sure he was okay.

“Hinata,” Daichi called after him, and he turned at the doorway to listen. “Make sure you tell Kageyama where you’re going and who you’re going to see. This isn’t something you want to spring on him.”

“Of course I’m going to tell him,” Hinata said, because duh, and also what the hell did that mean, and. “Um, Daichi-san?”

Daichi raised an eyebrow at him.

“When, uh, when will he be back? Only, he doesn’t know I’ve seen his body and I’m not really sure how to. Tell him…”

Daichi smirked. “You’re on your own there,” he said helpfully. Sugawara muttered something, and Daichi laughed. “Suga says you’ve got like half an hour.”

“Awesome,” Hinata muttered, and left. For once, he felt like he needed _more_ time alone. He thought about putting up walls against Kageyama’s return—they were all taught to do so, to construct mental barriers so their AI couldn’t hear them think, buy himself enough time to figure out what to say, but—but it had already been so long, and Kageyama hated updates so much, he didn’t want him to have to come back to a cold mind closed against him.

He did make a little room, though, and put into it all his hope that he could maybe someday bring Kageyama back. He boarded it up after him so his AI couldn’t see behind the walls. There was too much in that that _he_ didn’t understand, yet. He wanted to work at it without Kageyama bothering him.

He found Noya perched in his den-tree. He loved to be high up—had chosen the tree for its incredible height, its straight, branchless base and fanned crown. His den itself was built into a split that he swore blind was caused by wild lightning long ago, before the dome was sealed, and the tree was tall and weathered enough that Hinata believed it. Today, though, Noya had climbed past his sleeping-place to the almost flat-topped tangle of leaves and branches closest to the roof of the Dome. When Hinata joined him, breathing harder than he’d like to admit, he had his face turned upward, his profile picked out against the sky. For a moment it looked like the last fading stars of morning were sliding down his cheeks; it took Hinata a moment to realize they were tears. 

He swallowed hard. “N-Noya—“

Noya didn’t look at him, just licked his lips. “He won’t talk to me,” he said, his voice choked and miserable.

Hinata stared down at his hands. “Um, maybe if you didn’t call him a coward quite so much—“

“You saw him,” Noya said fiercely, turning on him. “You saw how big he was, how strong, how—“ He cut himself off. “If you and me can be out there every day risking our necks at our size, bringing back enough to feed the people we love at our size, think what he could have done!”

“He’s still helping, though,” Hinata pointed out. “You’ve said yourself he’s a genius AI—“

“He is,” Noya insisted. “In _my_ head, imperfectly synched. Think what he could have done on his own, not just as a brain but the whole deal! He could have been some kind of, of ace hunter, and he turned his back on it!” His lips twisted. “Of course I’m going to call him a coward. Besides, he stopped talking to me before I even went down there.”

Hinata blinked. “Really? Why?”

Noya sniffed, rubbing at his nose with the back of his hand. “Didn’t want me to see, I guess,” he said. He stared hard at his knees. “Maybe he knew what I would think.”

Hinata kept quiet, watching him.

“I just—“ Noya started, and ran both hands into his hair, fingers flexing in frustration. “ _God_ , I wasn’t expecting—he looks. Looked. Nothing and everything like I imagined, you know?”

Hinata thought of the weird, jagged fall of Kageyama’s hair. “I know,” he said softly.

Like the thought had been a summons, he was hit with a soap-bubble pop of returning awareness, a blossoming outward of mind that was at once incredibly refreshing and insanely disorienting. The first coherent thought he could pick out was— _the hell are you doing up so high, didn’t Daichi-san tell you to wait for me somewhere reasonable in case_ —and then he knew Kageyama had seen his most recent memories, because he went totally silent, any words absorbed by confusion, surprise, and a wave of anxiety like nothing Hinata had ever felt, terrible and overwhelming.

And then visual cues clicked back in and Noya was staring at him with red-rimmed eyes and Kageyama compartmentalized like only he could. The anxiety faded to a dull, waiting buzz at the back of his head, and his AI said calmly, _You don’t know why he did what he did._

It took Hinata a minute to realize what the hell he was talking about, and then he said, “Kageyama, um, says that you don’t know why Asahi chose this.”

He very, very carefully didn’t think about all the stuff _he_ didn’t know.

Noya made a tiny, dismissive noise. “He did it because he’s scared. Of, of pain, of dying out here before we save the world. I can feel _how_ scared, I—If he had a good reason he wouldn’t be hiding from me. He would just tell me.” He said it loudly, pointedly, like a challenge, and Hinata half-expected him to go still and listening and soft-eyed like he did when he was talking to Asahi in his head.

He didn’t—remained hard-edged and staring and a little twitchy, and Hinata gnawed at the inside of his cheek. “He’ll be back,” he said, because of course he would.

Noya hunched his shoulders like a hyperactive bat. “I’m not even sure I want him to be,” he muttered.

 _Lie_ , Kageyama murmured.

 _Tell me about it_ , Hinata said silently. Aloud, he repeated, “Just give it some time, yeah?” He took a breath. “Are you gonna be okay? I, um, I should go, but—do you want me to wake Tanaka up—“

Noya waved a hand at him. “Nah,” he said. “Go, I’ll be fine, I might—I might go do it myself in a minute.”

“Good idea,” Hinata said, though he’s not really sure it is—not for Asahi, not the way Tanaka’s been feeling about him, but it can’t be helped. Noya needed a friend, and Hinata had. Other things. He needed to do. He swarmed down the trunk.

 _So_ , said Kageyama as his foot touched loam.

 _So_ , Hinata said back, his cheeks heating inexplicably.

The buzz of anxiety swelled and then softened as Kageyama struggled to keep it in check. _Are you planning on telling me anything about the fact that you, y’know, saw my body, or am I going to have to fucking guess—_

 _Like you don’t know already!_ Hinata snapped back, and he wasn’t even sure why, he’s not pissed, he’s just. Agh. _You saw my memories, you know what I felt—_

 _You’re right,_ Kageyama shot back, sarcastic, _we should probably do away with words altogether, and privacy, too, since you seem to assume I would ignore it to the point of downloading your emotion without your permission—_

 _You didn’t?_ Hinata asked, blindsided. If it were him, he was certain he wouldn’t have been able to resist.

 _No, idiot,_ Kageyama snapped, _I didn’t, because I’m good at what I do and I know the difference between downloading what I need in order to understand a situation and absorbing every piece of data involved—_

“I didn’t like it!” Hinata snapped aloud, and then swallowed. _I didn’t—I didn’t like it, okay?_

Kageyama went silent. The anxiety shifted, spiked, changed composition—hurt, sorrow. _What. What does that mean._

It wasn’t really a stutter, because the stuff that passed between them wasn’t really words. But it was like the sentiment _behind_ a stutter, the thing a stutter stands in for, the emotional glitch unable to be perfectly conveyed by the human voice, and Hinata was immediately horrified with himself. 

_Not you!_ He said quickly. _Oh my god, not you—I liked—you—it had nothing to do with the way you looked, or—or it did but not like that! You look fine, you’re._ He realized he was standing at the tree that marked the entrance to Storage making contorted faces at nothing, and reminded himself firmly that moving while talking to Kageyama was not only possible, it was something he did basically every second of every day and so should really not take this much effort. He darted around the tree and trotted down the steps carved beneath its roots. _You’re pretty—_ he started, and then stopped, because pretty what, what adjective would even really go there that wasn’t embarrassing as hell? 

He didn’t realize what stopping at that point in the sentence actually meant until Kageyama prompted confusedly, _I’m…pretty?_ and then he nearly swallowed his tongue. He was such an idiot. This was going even worse than he thought. He’d managed to both upset and compliment Kageyama entirely unintentionally, if he even saw ‘pretty’ as a compliment and not just Hinata being weird, because it was a mistake but he kind of. Meant it anyway. 

_Pretty ugly,_ he shot back, resorting to playground insults because his brain was too jumbled up for anything else. 

Kageyama snorted at him, some of the panicked emotion receding and something new—tiny and squirming and pleased—joining the mix. _So what did you mean, then?_

Hinata took a breath and pulled this month’s pantry door open. _I didn’t like how still you were,_ he said simply. _You looked dead, and you weren’t in my head anymore, so—so I couldn’t even make sure you weren’t actually._ He swallowed. _I want to see you again, but living,_ he said. _Walking, talking, laughing._

_You don’t want to see me laughing,_ Kageyama said, and he sounded sullen, a little resigned. _I’ve been told my smile gives children night-terrors. By children with night-terrors._

Hinata grinned to himself. It wasn’t much, but it was the most he knew about Kageyama’s life pre-AI, the only thing he’d learned since he found out that Kageyama _had_ a life pre-AI. Which, to be fair, had only been about two days ago, but two days was a long time when you’re used to conversation moving at the speed of thought. He itched to know more, but Kageyama balled up hard like a hedgehog, spikes out, if he felt pressed. You had to wait for him to come to you. 

Speaking of two days. He stepped forward into the dusty darkness, looking up and down the long, metal shelves that lined the room. Most of what was kept here was ancient—foodstuffs preserved in the dark and the cold from before the domes were sealed. Jars and cans lined every shelf. The barrels along the walls were more recent acquisitions—eggs plucked from their nests by Tsukishima and then pickled in water from the south edge of the dome where everything was too briny to be potable; smoked and dried fish that Noya caught with his bare hands. The deer meat he’d brought in himself. 

It was two days to Aobajosai, and he wanted to be prepared. 

_You saw it in my memories probably,_ he started, _but Daichi is sending us to Aobajousai to see someone called Oikawa, he said to be sure and tell you._

There was a pause, and then: 

_Oh,_ said Kageyama. _Okay._

It was like it was in the first few weeks—days, really, he’d been told it would be weeks but really it had only been days—before he figured out how to pick up on the nuance in Kageyama’s tone, on what the pace and feeling of his non-voice actually meant. There was just nothing in those syllables—robotic in a way that Kageyama never was.

Hinata slowed in the act of unzipping his pack. “You don’t want to,” he said, his voice loud in the hushed emptiness of Storage. 

Kageyama hesitated. _I don’t want_ you _to._

“How come?” 

_Oikawa-san is,_ said Kageyama, and then stopped. He didn’t actually repeat himself, but there was an echo of his earlier thought nonetheless: _Don’t want you to. Don’t want you to._

Hinata imagined reaching out and tugging at that feeling, bit his lip when he felt it give, revealing the little fragments of thought behind it— _he knows me, he knew me, you’ll know me, he’ll tell you_ —and then let go immediately, guilt making his physical hand twitch and cramp up like he’d touched something hot, pulled away too fast. 

Kageyama sent him something wordless and annoyed, like a mental flick on the forehead. _You shouldn’t be able to do that._

_You shouldn’t be able to download just my facts without my emotions but I thought we’d given up on telling each other what we can’t do,_ Hinata shot back, and then swallowed. _But I—shouldn’t have. You just—you went so weird—_

_I went weird? You’re the one digging around in my brain, you’re the one hiding some great happy secret behind your big old walls—_

“It’s not happy and it’s not a secret!” Hinata snapped. He always yelled better aloud. “It’s a dumbass hope and you can’t know until I’m maybe not so dumb in believing it, okay? That’s why we have to go see this Oikawa person.” 

Kageyama seemed to think about that. _Fine,_ he said at last. _I want to stretch my legs anyway,_ and then, muttered, _Dumbass hope for a dumbass boy._

“My ass is no more dumb than yours,” Hinata pointed out. “Mr. Human-Butt. Mr. My Superiority Complex is Actually Totally Unfounded Because It Turns Out I’m Just Like You—“ 

_Not just like,_ Kageyama said in that sort of underwater tone where Hinata was never sure whether he was supposed to hear, whether Kageyama was sending the thought to him or if Hinata’s mind—always at least half-focused on the other boy—had just flickered across it like—like his fingertips across the jar lids in front of him. _Less—_ the thought continued, and then dived down deeper under the surface, and Hinata couldn’t hear it anymore. 

_Kageyama?_ he asked, but Kageyama had pulled back into his quiet corner and said nothing. 

“Well, whatever,” Hinata said to a jar of peaches, and tucked it into his bag. 

Aobajousai was the quadrant to the north, directly opposite them across the Wood. Hinata had been west to Fukurodani a few times, but mostly he split his time between their own quadrant and Nekoma, to the east. He was often paired with a hunter called Kuroo in joint-quadrant hunts because of the other hunter’s height; Kageyama made up for a lot of Hinata’s inadequacies but couldn’t change the fact that there was some stuff Hinata just couldn’t see over without jumping, and when the name of the game was “don’t scare the game” jumping up and down in place was generally frowned upon.

He liked Kuroo well enough. He tended to wink and flirt lazily with Hinata, which he never really knew how to deal with, especially since Kageyama always went all weird and quiet when it happened (probably he had no more idea than Hinata what to do when flirted with). He was _good,_ though, not least because he, like Hinata, had an AI that was famously hard to work with—not for personality reasons, but because the strategic and physical demands he put on his hunter were so intense. 

Hinata had “met” him once. It was two years ago, only six months or so after he’d been paired with Kageyama, the second time he and Kuroo worked together, and they were scouting game—Hinata sitting on a lower branch, swinging his legs idly, Kuroo further up in the same tree, balanced and perfectly comfortable on an outstretched limb, his long legs braced and his hands tucked in his pockets. They’d been completely silent, Hinata scanning the ground for smaller game while Kuroo turned his eyes upward to the treetops and the sky above, and then Kuroo said, “so, I hear you’ve got the King sitting in the back of your head.”

 _Don’t call—_ Kageyama started, but Hinata was already there, his lips forming the “—him that!” before Kageyama’s thought even landed.

Kuroo looked down at him, eyebrow raised. “Yow,” he remarked mildly. “Expected you to commiserate, not leap to his defense.”

Hinata shook his head, turning his eyes back to the ground. “I’m not defending him,” he said, a little sullen. “He’s a jerk.”

 _Dick,_ Kageyama muttered at him.

 _Dumbass,_ Hinata sent back, absent, automatic.

“So I gather,” said Kuroo. “You’ve lasted longer with him than anyone, though.”

Hinata didn’t really know what to say to that, so he just shrugged and stared hard at the brush below. Was that a flicker of movement under the leaves? Could be a small rabbit or a squirrel or something—

“Me, I’ve got the Cat,” said Kuroo, his voice light, “and we get along just fine.”

Hinata’s head came up, immediately interested, and he felt Kageyama uncurl, a little catlike himself. “Really? But I heard he’s so…” he waved a hand, not really having words.

Kuroo smirked. “He certainly is _so_ ,” he said. “You wanna say hi?”

Hinata hesitated. It wasn’t that hunters _couldn’t_ trade AI once they’d settled into a partnership, but it wasn’t done often. He didn’t understand much of the science behind it, but the space in his brain was definitely Kageyama-shaped (sometimes, in his stupider moments, he thought maybe it had been Kageyama-shaped even before Kageyama slid into it) and it would be pretty weird to have anyone else occupy it. But he was curious as hell, and.

 _You mind?_ He asked Kageyama.

 _No,_ said his AI. He sounded comfortable—more comfortable than Kageyama ever sounded, which meant it was probably a cover over his actual nervousness. _Curious._

Hinata bit his lip. “Okay,” he said to Kuroo, and slid his fingers behind his ear. He ran his fingertips over the plug embedded in his skin. _Careful,_ he warned, _I might decide I like the Cat better than your dumb ass, and you’ll be out of a job._

 _Please,_ Kageyama scoffed, _no way could he bring out your potential like I can. Besides, you’re the one who should be worried—I might decide I like working with someone who’s more than two feet tall._

 _Shut up,_ Hinata said fondly, and tugged the plug out. Swallowing, he reached upward, passing the little plastic-and-metal vessel that was somehow his best friend into Kuroo’s hand.

It wasn’t the moment he realized Kageyama was his best friend, but it was the moment he was first terrified of what that meant.

Kuroo took it with care and handed Hinata his own. They all had standardized bases—had to, in order to be interchangeable—but the end of the plug that was visible outside of the hunters’ skin was always different, often modified over time by the hunters themselves. The Cat’s plug was true to his name. Someone—maybe Kuroo, maybe whoever had paired with the AI before him—had carved a little cat face into its flat end. The mouth was curled and cute, but the eyes were sharp, focused, almost sinister. Hinata braced himself and slid it into the port behind his ear.

Nothing happened. There was no inrush of personality, no shift at all, like he hadn’t placed the plug right, or Kuroo had given him an empty one. He glanced up at the other hunter in confusion, but Kuroo had the blank, inward-facing look that meant he was talking inside his head. If he’d been playing a prank, he probably would have waited to see Hinata’s reaction, right?

 _Um,_ he said, testing, into the emptiness of his own head. _Hello?_

There was another second of silence, and then a quiet voice said, _Hi._ It was just a voice the way Kageyama never was, no feeling of anything behind it, and then he felt a tiny, very deliberate flicker of shy sweetness, like a single ray of sunlight someone was letting through a set of blinds.

 _Woah,_ he said, kind of without meaning to. _Are you the Cat?_

Another ray of light—annoyance, now. _Kuroo calls me that,_ the intangible voice said. _My name’s Kenma._

 _I thought everyone called you that,_ Hinata said, surprised. _Not just Kuroo, I’ve heard of you—_

Kenma cut him off, his own thought slicing through Hinata’s so clean and clear that Hinata actually stopped thinking the end of his own sentence. _Kuroo started it. We’ve known each other a long time, even before we started working together._

Hinata blinked. It felt crazy, talking to Kenma. He and Kageyama interrupted each other all the time, but it was like talking over someone in physical conversation—the thoughts overlapped and wove through each other and everyone was always yelling. He didn’t think Kenma _could_ yell. Instead, he just stopped you talking so that he could speak into silence.

 _Oh,_ he said. _Well, I’m—I’m Shouyo. It’s nice to meet you, Kenma._

 _Shouyo,_ Kenma said quietly, and his voice made it into the tiniest of smiles.

It had obviously never occurred to him at the time, but now—setting out along the Nekoma border to Seijou, his pack stuffed with four days worth of food—he realized Kenma must have meant that he’d known Kuroo when they were both human, before he made whatever choice he’d made to become an AI. God, that must be weird for them both. He wondered what Kenma had looked like. Small, he thought, but then, he would have said the same of Asahi before yesterday.

He skipped lightly across a ford in a stream, laughing to himself as he imagined Kenma’s perfectly-controlled, nigh-invisible, light-soaked mind filling out a big burly body. Big burly Kenma doing normal, everyday things, with a little smile for Kuroo—or a frown, maybe; he could never really pin down their dynamic. Big burly Kenma with other friends. With hobbies. With family. With a full name.

He came to a stop, his feet still on the soft needles of a big pine. _Kageyama._

 _What?_ Kageyama asked. He’d been doing whatever the AI equivalent of sleeping was, and woke slow and grumpy like an old man. It was only because Hinata was so calm, he knew; if there and been any danger Kageyama would have been awake and aware in a flash. _Why’d you stop?_

Hinata gnawed at his lip. _Um,_ he said. _What’s your name?_

_What the hell are you talking about? You know my name—_

Hinata shook his head quickly. “Your first name,” he said to the waiting trees. They were heavy with moss, here; this was one of his favorite pieces of the Wood. The long avenues between the trunks were wide and cool, and the only animals were the songbirds flitting sweetly in the canopy above, too small to bother with. Nothing with any kind of good eating on it. Here, he didn’t have to be a hunter. Here, he could just be a boy.

There was a little pause, and then Kageyama said grudgingly, _Tobio._

 _Tobio,_ Hinata echoed, and then, aloud, to see how it tasted: “Tobio.” He wrinkled his nose. _Doesn’t suit you. Too serious and smart. I feel like people named Tobio should wear glasses and, like, sweater-vests, and carry around clipboards all the time._

 _What are you implying, idiot Hinata?_ Kageyama snapped.

 _That you’re a dumbass with perfect vision. And you’d look hilarious in a sweater vest._ It was—weirdly thrilling, still, to know that, to be able to picture that. _And you get mad when I make fun of your name, so ‘serious’ doesn’t even work, because you’re so dumb,_ Hinata retorted. _Take me to Seijou, okay?_

Kageyama griped and grumbled, but Hinata turned in a semi-circle and breathed in the sweet, damp-earth air and knew, in the part of his brain that he egotistically wanted to call instinct but knew was instead his perfect other half, exactly which way to go.

When they paused for the night he stared upwards, slowly building his mental walls with the inward-outward flow of every breath. Kageyama had once told him that when his walls were up it felt the same as when he was sleeping, only more intensely, and now, when he just needed a little space to think without Kageyama _knowing_ he needed space to think—well. He could fake falling asleep. All it took was determination and patience. Hinata had enough of the first for an army, and though the second came difficultly to him he had enough of it to have lived this long. Barely, but even so.

There were three stars above him that were particularly bright, part of some constellation that everyone had known about a hundred years ago but was now just tucked away in some box somewhere, labelled ‘irrelevant’ or ‘extraneous information’ or at best ‘cultural knowledge’; one of the thousands of boxes that would be gone through once the world was ready again for jobs like researcher or archivist or librarian. Hinata didn’t care what the stars had been before—now they were a grin; a little smirking line of anticipation that he couldn’t help but paste onto Kageyama’s pale, waiting face, a day’s walk behind and maybe, stupid hopeful maybe, a whole lifetime ahead.

 _Tobio,_ he thought to himself once his walls are all the way up. _Kageyama Tobio._

He drew patterns against the bark of his tree, his heart beating rabbit-fast in his chest. Kageyama Tobio. A boy just like him.

He continued to stare until the dark at the edges of his vision started swimming, and then dropped with a grunt to the ground. Couldn’t sleep because he couldn’t stop thinking; might as well continue on. He left his walls up, though, and thought about Noya and his little babbled insults against the glass case surrounding Asahi.

He didn’t think Kageyama was a coward. If anything, the decision seemed brave, noble. Give up on your body—on eating, on sleeping, on touching stuff and seeing it and hearing and everything—to live entirely inside another person’s brain, live their life instead, always and only with their permission, and then either be destroyed or passed on to somebody else? Anyone who shouldered that fate earned some hero points for sure. 

Besides, being a coward meant being scared all the time, right? He couldn’t really imagine Kageyama scared of anything. Even the anxiety that swept him when he found out that Hinata had seen his body wasn’t _fear_ , it was just. Anxiety. Anxiety didn’t make you a coward. 

He remembered coming home shaking from his first hunt, remembered the way the blood—it was just a _rabbit_ —looked against his almost translucent skin, how that made him shake even harder because—because that skin was the only thing between the prey’s blood and his own, a paper-thin wall that separated his life from the life he’d just taken.

He remembered the taste of vomit, the total and complete surety that he _could not do this._ Remembered finally passing out in a sweaty, sour tangle, his dreams dark and startling, flashing across his mind like someone was throwing them at him too fast to properly see.

Sugawara had been there when he woke up—woke him up, in fact; Sugawara had run cool fingers over his forehead and said softly, “this is why we never work alone.”

And then he’d pulled him to his feet and changed his life forever.

Hinata pulled down his mental walls. _Kageya—_

Kageyama’s returning awareness slammed into him so hard he physically staggered and then turned it immediately into a sideways dive, because Kageyama was _screaming_ at him, half to his head, half directly to his muscles to _move move i swear to god oh god move you dumbass you fucking idiot don’t ever shut me out when you’re wandering the fucking woods at night hinata hinata hinata MOVE—_

Hinata did, catching himself on one arm as he came out of his dive and pushing himself up again, responding to Kageyama’s _up!!_ , quieter now that he realized Hinata’s walls were down but still too loud in Hinata’s head for him to think about anything else. He flicked a knife from his belt, leapt, and plunged it into the straight, branchless trunk of the nearest tree, then scrambled up so he was balanced on its hilt and fumbled for his next one. _What—_ he managed to ask, and then something wrapped around his ankle and pulled.

Hinata shouted, fell, flailed, got a hand on the dagger in the tree to slow his fall and managed to pull it out with him. He hit the ground hard, hit something sharp, pain blossoming from his knee and side, but had no time to process, no time to breathe. He twisted, his stomach muscles screaming as he folded himself in half and slashed at whatever had grabbed him, plunging his dagger awkwardly at where he thought fur and flesh might be.

He expected—not really consciously, because there was no room for conscious thought and if he’d applied any actual reasoning to it it would have fallen apart—but he expected a bear, or some kind of, of monkey, a descendent of the original test-animals kept in the derelict zoology buildings in Fukurodani, or—he didn’t _know_ , but the thing that shrieked at him, its grip around his ankle loosening—was human.

Had. Had been human. Once.

 _Focus_ , snapped Kageyama as the thing gathered itself again, and Hinata ignored the bile in his throat to concentrate on the way his AI was guiding him. The thing swung at him with the arm not attached to his ankle, and Hinata rolled sideways, the place where the creature had him serving as a pivot. His ankle throbbed as he bent it ways it wasn’t meant to go, but the creature’s fist slammed into the ground in his wake and Hinata was behind it, was slashing forward with his knife, cutting clean through its hamstrings. The thing screamed—the sound ripping from its throat—and released him, and Hinata, moving with Kageyama’s thought in every motion of his muscle, shoved himself to his feet. He swung his uninjured leg hard, kicking the thing in the back of the head so it went sprawling, and then plunged his dagger into the base of its skull where it lay.

Gurgling, hissing, oozing black onto the soft green earth, the thing died.

Hinata sat down hard where he was, leaning his head backward on his neck so he could breathe air that smelled of pine, not blood, and tried not to cry.

 _What the hell,_ he said after a minute.

 _I don’t know,_ said Kageyama, shaken. _I—I don’t know._

There was the feeling of a swallow, and—and that made sense, now, in a way that it never had before, because it wasn’t just the feeling but the memory of the swallow, Hinata thought hazily, Kageyama should, he should have a throat again, a throat to swallow with, that. That would be good. 

_Hinata,_ Kageyama said, like he was trying to wake him up, which didn’t make any sense because Hinata wasn’t sleeping. 

“Side hurts,” Hinata mumbled, because it did—hurt worse than maybe anything he’d ever felt. He glanced down at himself.

The world was a little grey at the edges, but his side was beautiful scarlet. He thought, _prey blood,_ for a second, and then realized that the thing’s blood had been much darker, much thicker, hadn’t smelled like this—like the water in the baths at home. Sharp. Full of metal. 

He thought, _rabbit blood,_ and then he said, “Oh.”

 _Hinata,_ Kageyama said, urgent. _Hey—!_

Hinata giggled, his eyes slipping closed and open and open and closed, like the wings of a lazy butterfly. “Kageyama,” he said, “you _can_ be scared.”

There were—ants, in his vision, so many tiny little black ants, floods and torrents of them until they merged into a kind of pulsing blackness, filling up his whole eyes.

 _Please,_ he heard Kageyama, like a whisper, or—or like a shout, but from very very far away. _Please, no, no—_

Hinata tried to reach out to him, take his hand, tell him it was going to be okay, he just needed to sleep for a bit, but then the blackness filled his head, too, and he couldn’t do anything at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for the comments on the first chapter! This is a fic that feels very self-indulgent to me so I'm glad that other people are enjoying it as well.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the added "body horror" tag; if you are squeamish this chapter (and this fic) may not be for you

There were no fish for Nishinoya to catch. The moon was bright above him—the stream was bright _around_ him, silver with reflected light—everything was bright, and his feet were too cold, dug into the rocky, sandy stream bed, the water licking around his ankles, and there were no fish for him to catch.

Tanaka was saying something. Noya knew he should be listening, knew that he was being unfair to his friend, but. Par for the course, right. If he was going to be unfair he might as well be unfair to everyone.

Tanaka nudged his side, scowling. “ _Noya._ ”

Noya ran a hand over his face. “Yeah. Sorry. Hi.”

His friend gave him an unimpressed look. “I thought the two of you weren’t talking.”

Noya ran his tongue around the stale inside of his mouth. “We’re not,” he said shortly.

Tanaka narrowed his eyes. “Right,” he said, “great, so you’re just regular-type ignoring me these days.”

Noya’s head hurt. Noya’s _throat_ hurt. Noya’s chest hurt with a kind of loneliness he’d never felt in his life, and it was all his own stupid goddamn fault. Pushing away his best friend wasn’t going to make him feel any better. “Sorry. Sorry, I—I’m really.” He grinned, grimaced, closed his teeth around empty air. “I’m a mess, Ryu.”

Tanaka’s face softened. He reached out and pulled Noya into a bear-hug, holding him tight against his chest, and Noya let out a long breath against him. “I’m sorry too,” Tanaka said softly. “I’m sorry I was mean about him, I know what you two have has got fuck all to do with me. It’s. In a league of its own, man.”

“What we have,” Noya echoed miserably. “Ha.”

Tanaka took him by the shoulders. “ _Yeah,_ what you have,” he said firmly. “I don’t care what it feels like, he’s gonna come back. He’s in your _head,_ Noya. What’s he gonna do, leave?”

Noya shrugged. “Come back long enough to request a transfer to someone else?” he suggested dully.

“Not gonna happen,” Tanaka said. “It’s just not. I was talking to Daichi and Suga-san about him yesterday—“

Noya blinked at him. “You were?”

Tanaka raised his eyebrows. “Duh,” he said. “You don’t think I went down there immediately, as soon as I heard he had a body? You don’t think I was gonna go see the guy that’s stolen my best bro’s heart right outta my hands?”

“Shut up,” said Noya, his lips curling in automatic response, his body expressing easy joy before his heart remembered to hurt. He swallowed. “And? What did you think? What did they say?”

Tanaka watched him, his expression careful. “I think a lot of stuff,” he said, and then, slower, “Noya—you of all people know that size isn’t everything. If Asahi really thought he’d be of more use in your head—“

Noya shook himself. “I know—Ryu, it’s. It’s not even about that—or. It is, because. Fuck, what a waste, you know?” He found himself smiling again, and Tanaka smiled back, a little wary and waiting. Noya took a breath. “It’s. I—I guess—I don’t know.” He did know, kind of—had been working it out, chewing it over in his head. But it was too new, too much to say here in the open with the stream and the sky and his best friend to hear.

Tanaka shrugged, his mouth still in that sideways, almost resigned smile. “You don’t gotta be able to say it to me,” he said. “But maybe see if you can say it to him.”

Noya licked his lips. “I will.”

Tanaka watched him for another minute and then gave him a nod, turning back to stare into the dazzling water. Noya mirrored him, his eyes searching for movement below the shifting surface. “What, um,” he said as casually as he could, “what did Daichi and Suga say about him?”

Tanaka shook his head. “It was funny, actually. I mentioned that you said he was a coward, and Suga got really mad at me.”

It took a minute for Noya to process the fact that he hadn’t misheard Daichi’s name as his boyfriend’s. He stared at Tanaka. “Suga? _Suga_ got mad at you?” He couldn’t imagine Suga angry. He couldn’t imagine Suga as anything but gentle and pleasant—maybe a little annoyed when he was tired but never too far from smiling. _Really mad_ was—impossible to transpose onto his face.

Tanaka laughed. “I know, right? It was kinda scary, he went all quiet and he was, like, glaring, and his mouth got all tight and pinched, and Daichi had to calm him down.”

Noya shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “I can’t see it at all.”

“It was definitely weird. I think maybe they knew him or something, like they were friends, but that doesn’t make sense, does it? They don’t age in those tubes, right?”

Noya shrugged. “I dunno.”

Tanaka scratched his head. “Like—if they do, maybe Daichi and Suga-san knew him when they were all little kids, before he got all—digitized? But if they don’t, then he was already buff and huge when he went in there, and if that had been recently we would know, because if he’s from Karasuno _we_ would’ve known him too.”

That thought—Asahi as a childhood friend, Asahi as any kind of external friend at all—was the keystone of all the things what Nishinoya had been thinking about over the past two days, and he clenched his fists, not surprised that Tanaka followed his thinking, but still not quite braced enough for the blow of hearing it aloud. “Yeah,” he said, tightly.

Tanaka pursed his lips. “Bro,” he said firmly. “You’re not gonna catch any fish by punching ‘em, and you’re not doing very good at uncurling those hands.”

Nishinoya rolled his shoulders. “I,” he started, and stopped again.

Tanaka cracked his neck and waved him away. “Go,” he said. “Get up high, let the sky in.”

It was an old joke—when he was little, okay, littler, okay, it still definitely happened—Noya’s head got too full. He was too good at feeling things all at once, too good at having so many thoughts in his head that they all knocked each other out of place. Tanaka used to take him way up high into the tallest tree he could find, rap him on the head with his knuckles.

“Who’s there?” Noya would ask.

“The sky,” Tanaka always replied, dead serious, and Noya would turn his face upward to the blue and open his eyes as wide as possible like he was funneling it right into his brain. Once his head was full of big wide emptiness he could think about the thoughts like clouds slipping by, one by one, look at them from the outside and see their shape.

“Thank you,” he said, heartfelt, but Tanaka was already throwing himself into the water, ostensibly hands-first but mostly face-first. Noya grinned to himself as he waded out of the water. One of these days Ryu was going to catch a fish with his teeth.

He didn’t really want to go home—he’d spent too long there in the last few days already, being angry and alone and scared and sad, and he didn’t want to put himself back in that space. But Tanaka was right, he had to get up high, so he chose one of his favorite points at the edge of the camp. It took a few minutes of running—half on the ground, then upwards from tree to tree like they were steps in a stair—but it was worth it. 

The tree in question was a tall, freestanding pine, alone in the center-west of a clearing. Noya had always thought that if he could see it from above like a hawk it would look like the pupil and iris of a giant green eye, swiveling leftward to look west at the Karasuno border with Furokudani. The top had somehow been sheared off—not broken, but cut clean and flat a long time ago, maybe when the Dome was first being built, because the wood had sealed itself again, gone grey with weather—and the branches fanned radially outward. Noya swung himself up to sit cross-legged on the flat surface of the top, leaned back on his hands, and closed his eyes.

For a moment he just listened to the wind, letting it dry his ankles and feet, picking him clean of sand and mud. Only when he’d lost himself a little in the beauty of the outside world did he turn his attention inward.

There was no sign of Asahi, no awareness at the back of his head, but maybe—maybe he was listening anyway.

“I don’t think you’re a coward,” he began. His voice was snatched away by the wind, but he wanted to speak aloud—it felt more binding, somehow, more true. It was easy to say anything at all when you were speaking mind to mind, and sometimes passing thoughts or discarded phrases got given the same weight as the things he truly intended to say. “That’s not why I’m angry. Not really.”

He took another breath. “I’m angry,” he said, “not because I feel like you robbed us of an awesome hunter, but because I feel like you robbed me of you.”

He was starting to cry again, but the wind turned it to salt on his cheeks and he could safely ignore it. “Daichi and Sugawara knew you,” he said, “so I—I could have known you, we could have.” He swallowed, licked his lips. “We could have fought together, side by side, thrown ourselves against this endless upward struggle, and died, together, in the fight, but now—“ his voice broke.

“Now,” he continued when his throat had finished betraying him, “now I’ll die alone, and in a hundred years, a thousand, you’ll step out of that tube into some new world I can’t even imagine and you’ll barely remember I was yours at all.”

_Nishinoya,_ Asahi said suddenly, and it was a good thing Noya had spent his entire life in trees or he might have fallen out he was so shocked. There was fear in Asahi’s tone, terrible, dark fear like nothing Noya had ever felt. _It’s Hinata—_

The name was accompanied by screaming. Not Hinata’s screaming, or even Asahi’s, but a deep desperate mental voice Noya instinctively recognized as Kageyama, conveyed to him somehow through Asahi. _HELP,_ he was shouting, with an intensity that was less like volume and more like brightness, somehow; it whited out Noya’s vision for a whole breath and a half. _HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP—_

There were coordinates accompanying the scream, and Noya was swinging himself down out of the tree before he’d processed where they were. He cursed himself for choosing this place rather than his own den, who fucking cared how sad he’d been there, Hinata needed him and he was wasting precious time running back to grab his weapons. By the time he’d strapped on his long knife, slung his pack on his back—knowing he didn’t have enough food for the journey out and back and not caring—and made it to the edge of camp, Tsukishima was waiting for him.

Noya didn’t stop, and Tsukishima didn’t expect him to, matching his half-jog. Noya wanted to sprint, run, but Asahi had quietly filled him in on how long it would take to reach the point in the forest where Kageyama’s screaming was coming from and he knew that tiring himself out immediately would only slow himself down in the long run.

In the old days, he was told, there had been enough of them that this would never happen. In the old days they’d worked in grids, never further than shouting distance from another hunter, to avoid exactly this situation. What the hell was Hinata doing so far outside camp, anyway? It was like he’d made a beeline north, not following the tracks of anything or even pausing along the way.

“Do you know what happened?” he asked Tsukishima.

The other hunter was pale with moonlight and fear. He shook his head, his fingers playing idly with the clasp on his chest that would let his long spear free of its sheath at his back. He’d broken it down into two pieces so that he could run, but Noya knew from experience he could have it assembled again in the time it took for a boar to draw a breath. “No,” he said, “but Yamaguchi says hurry.”

After that there was nothing to do but run, run, concentrate on not running too fast or letting panic set into his lungs to make him wheeze. The screaming had ended, a strange silence in its place, like maybe Kageyama was still _there,_ he was just concentrating very very hard elsewhere, and beneath his unfamiliar presence was Asahi’s familiar one, worried, worried, worried.

It was more of a comfort than Noya would ever be able to express to anyone, just having him there as he ran through the night, even if nothing was actually resolved between them.

He didn’t have to explain it to Asahi—his brain did it for him—and his AI sent him a tiny shy reassurance, like he wasn’t sure it was welcome. Noya flicked back gratitude, and after that it was a little easier to breathe.

They’d been running for maybe an hour, maybe longer, when Kageyama was in his head again, snapping an abrupt, _Okay,_ and then he was gone for real, leaving Asahi and Noya alone.

Tsukishima must have received the same thought, because he slowed and finally stopped, glancing at Noya.

Noya stopped beside him. “What the fuck does that mean?” he asked, and it came out explosive after all the silence. 

Tsukishima stared hard at the ground for a long moment. “We should keep going,” he said at last.

Noya looked sideways at him, waiting. Tsukishima didn’t talk much—mostly interjections into other people’s conversations, ranging from the snide to the insightful—but he was smart, and Noya knew he cared more about all of them than he let on.

Tsukishima licked his lips. “Even _if_ Hinata’s okay, which I’m not really convinced he is, he definitely wasn’t before, and just because the most urgent danger’s passed that doesn’t mean all of it has.” He met Noya’s eyes squarely. “He might still need us. Besides, what else are we going to do?” His lips curled up, sardonic. “Sleep?”

Noya grinned wryly at him, and they started up their jog again.

They were forced to stop about an hour after dawn. Noya’s legs were aching, and he nearly tripped over roots twice, Asahi warning him barely in time. Tsukishima was no better, his eyes set deep in his face behind the lenses he’s rigged to protect them. They found a place to set up camp, a dense thicket, to hide them from prying eyes—Tsukishima said flatly, “we still don’t know what the danger was, after all,” and the fact that Noya hadn’t even _thought_ of that said a lot about how tired he was, as well.

He felt cold, even wrapped in the blanket he kept at the bottom of his pack and tucked into this—webbed cocoon of tiny branches.

Tuskishima unpacked his own things, methodical, and Noya watched him with interest as he took out wrapped package after wrapped package of food. “Woah,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Why do you have so much?”

Tsukishima didn’t meet his eyes. “We’re going a long way.”

“Yeah,” Noya said, “but you didn’t know that until the same time I did, and there was no way you had time to pack all this.”

Tsukishima glanced away, his cheeks darkening in the pearly morning light. Noya just watched him and waited; embarrassment and anger were one shade away from each other in Tsukishima, and it wouldn’t do him any good to prod.

“I was already going after him,” Tsukishima admitted at last.

Noya blinked. “Why?”

Tsukishima looked at him, answered his question with one of his own. “Tanaka said you and Asahi weren’t talking. Why?”

Noya gnawed on his lip. Hinata had dropped in on him right before he left, telling him that Daichi and Sugawara had said not to tell Tsukishima about the AI having bodies, but he was really bad at lying (well—that wasn’t entirely true. He was bad at telling _other people’s_ lies. He was pretty good at his own, especially to himself) and something told him there was a lot about this situation that Kageyama’s mysterious panic—and whatever danger was at its source—had changed.

But—tell him _now,_ when he couldn’t do anything about it? When he couldn’t go see Yamaguchi? Noya knew very little about Tsukishima’s relationship to his AI but he knew if he’d been told when he was this far away from Asahi it would have driven him mad.

He took a breath, but Tsukishima apparently took his hesitation for an answer, because he made a small, dismissive sound and turned away, pulling his blanket from his pack and replacing all the food but a single bundle in the same methodical way. This last bundle he unwrapped to reveal bread and cheese and apples—probably the most perishable of the things he’d brought—and he took half for himself, using his foot to push the other half towards Noya.

Noya’s own dinner had consisted of half a dozen strips of squirrel jerky, as he’d been assuming he was feeding himself on barely half rations, so he took it gladly with muttered, awkward thanks.

Tsukishima settled back against the trunk of the tree when he’d finished, closing his eyes, but Noya knew he wasn’t sleeping, just talking to Yamaguchi. He could tell because Tsukishima’s mouth was moving—just a little, but constantly, little steady motions of his thin lips. It was kind of cute, like the incessant twitching of a rabbit’s nose.

_Nishinoya,_ Asahi said, and Noya stopped deliberately distracting himself and tried to square up to face him head on.

_Please don’t,_ Asahi said, feeling him shift into a determined mental stance. _It makes me feel like we’re going to start boxing._

Noya let his eyes slip closed, willed himself to relax. It was hard, with Asahi so anxious and right there. _Let’s not,_ he joked. _You’d win._

_I don’t know about that,_ Asahi countered. _You’re small, but you pack a hell of a punch._ There was a pause, and then he said, _I’m. Speaking metaphorically here, as well as literally. In case. That wasn’t clear._

Noya winced. _Asahi,_ he said, and licked his lips. _I’m—_

_Don’t—apologize, please,_ Asahi said, somehow making the request into an apology of his own. _There’s no need._

It was the first time they’d talked since Noya saw his body—like, _obviously_ it was, but it was just now hitting Noya what that actually meant, how that changed his perception of the voice inside his head. _You were probably the kind of tall person that made yourself small all the time, huh?_ he asked suddenly.

Asahi flicked confusion at him, and Noya continued, following this thread with fascination. _Yeah,_ he said. _Like, Tsukishima is tall as hell and he makes a lot of it—guy likes to loom. Tanaka likes to loom, too, if you piss him off, and he’s not even that tall. But you—_ he found himself smiling, a little, and he let it happen. _You’ve probably never loomed in your life._

_Only accidentally,_ Asahi admitted, a little rueful.

Noya’s smile turned into a full grin. _Typical. Took that shit for granted. Must be weird to have been put in my head and suddenly be like a foot and a half closer to the ground all the time._

_Definitely,_ Asahi said, _but it’s not even in the top ten of the weirdest things about being in your head._

It was too fast—too honest—to have gone through his normal seventeen layers of filtering, and Noya felt him regret it as soon as it happened. _Oh yeah?_ he asked, pointed.

_Nishinoya,_ Asahi pleaded.

_Nope,_ Noya said firmly. _You heard me pour my heart out earlier—_ he paused. _Or—I, I assume you did—_

_Yes,_ Asahi said, quick and simple, pulling the thought back again like a lure, and Nishinoya, never a prey animal, barely stopped himself from leaping after it. Instead he swallowed and continued, _so–so now it’s your turn. I’m letting you off the hook, really. I could demand you just respond to my dumb ramble instead._

There was a long pause where Noya could feel Asahi gathering himself, and then—something happened, some shifting-closer of minds, because suddenly he could feel a lot more than he ever could before, more of Asahi’s mind, more of the—for lack of a better word, the _breath_ of him, the living presence. The _warmth._ It was like shifting closer to a campfire, or. Or being wrapped in someone’s arms. He swallowed again, harder.

_Weirdest—so like, number one, or number ten, depending on how you want to count—is just how differently you think,_ Asahi said. _It’s_ _—_ _honestly, it’s amazing. Not even how you think about_ stuff _so much as how you think about_ people. _I spent my whole life not really knowing how to interact with people. Not because I didn’t like them, I liked them a lot, I just didn’t know how to do what they wanted, or be who I should be—_

He trailed off, probably because Noya was beaming disapproval at him with everything he had. _There’s your first problem,_ he pointed out. _Stop trying to be what people want, ‘cause it’s never gonna work._

_But—_ Asahi protested. _You’re what people want, you do things to make people happy all the time—_

_That’s different,_ Noya argued. _I do things to make people happy because I want to, not because—_ he made a little frustrated noise. _It’s different! You gotta be who you are no matter what! There’s a difference between always living your life scared that you’re gonna do something wrong because you think there’s something wrong about_ you _, and living your life doing nice things for people because you don’t want_ them _to be sad._

_I’m not really sure there is,_ Asahi said slowly. _For me._

Noya frowned. _Asahi—_

_Nishinoya,_ Asahi interrupted him, _are you going to keep giving me advice or are you going to shut up so I can compliment you?_

There was a levity in his voice, deliberate but still real, and Noya squirmed a little, pleased at the show of backbone. _By all means,_ he said grandly, and the smile Asahi sent him was so real Noya swore he could fucking—feel it, like Asahi was sitting behind him, ducking his head and hiding his satisfaction in the crook of Noya’s neck.

_Did you just—_ he asked, just as Asahi started to say something again, and then Asahi was drawing back, a little, the worry that had receded returning full force.

_Sorry,_ he said, and it started feeling more like it usually did, like he was there but not—breath-type there, not wrapped-around-Noya-there.

Noya tried to grab him with mental hands. _No,_ he said, _no, please. Stay. I wasn’t—I want. It’s—nice._

The word was hilariously inadequate, but thankfully the word wasn’t all he had, and slowly Asahi drew close again, a little more tentative this time. 

_Compliments,_ Noya reminded him, because clearly the other thing—whatever the hell it _was—_ wasn’t something Asahi was ready to talk about.

That was okay. Noya was cool with not putting stuff into words, so long as the stuff kept happening.

_Compliments,_ Asahi agreed, his worry sliding away again. _I was trying to say—you’re so good with people. You and Tanaka are closer than I can even imagine being with someone whose brain I don’t share, and Hinata loves you—_

The mention of Hinata send a spike of cold through Noya, but a thread of Asahi’s thought—separate from the part of him that’s concentrating on how to phrase his compliments—flickered out to reassure him, _I’ve been checking in with Kageyama every few minutes. He doesn’t have time to explain, but he’s okay and getting better as we speak._

_Thank you,_ he said to the little standby bit of Asahi’s brain, and turned his attention back to Asahi prime.

– _and with Natsu,_ he was saying. _Even with Tsukishima, you know how to be with him, like, you know when to listen and when to question and it’s just—it’s amazing, it really is, especially because it’s not calculated at all, it’s all. If I were looking at it from the outside I would say you were incredibly observant, and I think you are, but there’s a part of it that’s not even conscious, like you can size up a situation or a person at a glance and always know exactly how to move._

Noya felt his cheeks heat, and he rubbed his hands up and down his legs in embarrassment. _That’s the most words I think you’ve ever said to me,_ he joked.

_Well,_ Asahi said, surprisingly bold, _I care a lot about the subject._

_Oh,_ said Noya, feeling like he might explode. _Um, wh-what’s number four? On the list. Of weirdest things._

_Specifically four?_ Asahi asked. _Is that one one or ten?_

_Specifically four,_ Noya confirmed, _and—let’s say that’s one._

_If that’s one,_ Asahi said, and then all in a rush, _four’s probably being able to feel the way you feel when you look at Shimizu._

Noya blinked his eyes open. Tsukishima was still leaning against the tree, eyes closed, but his lips had stopped moving, and his chest was rising and falling slow, a weird counterpoint to the unsteady uptempo of Noya’s own heart. _What does that mean?_

_Well,_ Asahi said carefully, _I was never into girls. When. I had a body. So it’s weird to have that—second-hand?_

Noya wondered if this was how Tanaka had felt when Noya had come out to _him_ about a year ago, sitting in the dark of Noya’s child-home and admitting softly that sometimes—just sometimes—he got distracted by the way the light hit Daichi’s jaw, that sometimes—just sometimes—he saw him hold hands with Suga and he Got It in a way that he maybe figured was more than just the general romantic one. The question that came up in his head was the same dumb one Tanaka had asked—no malice, just honest curiosity, _are you attracted to me,_ though he was absolutely definitely more invested in Asahi’s answer than Tanaka had been in his.

He didn’t ask, though. Not in any more deliberate way than he asked every question he ever even vaguely thought about, anyway. Let it get lost in the shifting, too-full maelstrom of his brain. 

_I bet that is weird,_ he said instead. _What about number seven?_

_Number seven is how bad you are at eating with anything except your hands,_ Asahi said immediately, with only half-hidden relief. _I swear, Nishinoya, it’s like no one ever taught you what a fork is for._

Noya laughed aloud in surprise, and Tsukishima threw an apple at his head.

+

Hinata woke up still reaching, lurching forward, Kageyama’s name dying on his lips. He blinked, the darkness gone from his head. He was lying down on—on something soft, and the air was _bright,_ he. He rubbed a hand across his eyes and tried to sit up a little.

He was in an outpost tree—at least he thought he was, because the wind sounded like he was up high; he’d never seen anything like the room he was in. Most of the dens he’d been in had been pretty rough-hewn, carved out from their trees with hand tools over the course of months with practicality, rather than artistry, in mind.

This—this was a masterpiece of woodworking. The floor was perfectly flat, like it was on top of that tree Noya loved, and he was in a real bed—with a frame, and a kind of mattress stuffed with something soft. The walls—if you could even call them that—were made up of long, curving slats of wood, smoothed and graceful, that tapered as they rose so that the rest of the tree above him—he wasn’t too far off the ground, he thought—seemed to perch delicately on a multitude of thin-tipped spikes. They wrapped around Hinata—the slat that began directly at his feet swooped left and around him so that its tip was just above his left ear, and the others were parallel—so the effect was that of being caught in a perfectly still tornado. The air was so bright because the sun was everywhere—let in through the spaces between the slats, pouring in through the doorway to Hinata’s right.

Hinata swallowed, his throat dry. “Wh—Kageyama, where are we?” His whole body ached, worst in his leg and side, but there was something else, a fuzziness to him, an. Emptiness.

_Kageyama?_ he tried again, fear prickling at the back of his neck.

There was a pause, like someone thinking about breaking a total silence, and then a small uncoiling of voice. _Sorry, Shouyo,_ it said, _it’s me._

Hinata blinked. _Kenma?_ he asked, and instinctively knew that it was his tree that they were in—not the one Kuroo and he stayed in now but Kenma's own, the place he’d lived before he made his choice. It was the light, he thought, the way it had sunk into every line and curve of wood. Home mirrored mind, and Hinata knew that whatever Kenma had looked like before he gave up his body, it wasn’t the big, burly boy of his laughing imagination. He would have had to be someone who fit into this space perfectly, like the last piece of a delicately orchestrated puzzle.

He swallowed. “What—where’s Kageyama, what happened—“

There was a noise from outside, and a face appeared above the entrance, upside-down. “Chill,” Kuroo said, “I’ve got him, he’s fine.” He swung himself down the rest of the way, landing upright in the doorway. “‘Least, he is now that you’re awake. Shouting up a storm inside my head to give him back to you, but unfortunately, no can do.”

Hinata blinked at him. “Hi,” he said, and then, “wait, what? Why not? Why is Kenma—?”

_Had to fix you,_ Kenma said simply. With a twist of mind he showed Hinata—himself, lying pale and bleeding out in the wide, beautiful avenue between the trees, his red red blood turning the green moss black beneath him. Hinata watched himself as he twitched and shifted and moved, one hand coming up to push himself to his feet, a figure too limp and shaking to possibly be conscious, watched as he careened and slipped and slid from tree to tree, none of his limbs moving quite right, watched as he fell, again, stood, again, leaving splashes and splatters of blood in his wake, a pale, barely upright writing brush leaving its signature across the forest floor.

_How—_ Hinata flicked to Kenma, or maybe Kenma just lifted it out of his mind, made the desperate, horrified urge to know into a word so he could answer it. 

_Kageyama,_ he said simply. _He was trying to get you closer to us so we could help. I think he tried to patch you up, but fine motor skills in someone else’s body are beyond even him._

Hinata—small, far-away, dying Hinata—slumped, finally, against another tree, the artificial life that had briefly energized him draining away again. There was a flicker—Kenma said, _about an hour—_ and then a figure swung down from another tree to skid to a halt next to Hinata’s body. Kuroo—his signature wild hair gave him away—knelt by his side and, moving terribly quickly, swung his pack off his back, tearing Hinata’s shirt away from his side and wrapping clean cloth around him. Without pausing at all he swung Hinata wholesale onto his back and ran, abandoning the trees for the open roads between.

_Why you two?_ Hinata asked as the image faded. _Why did he call you?_

Kenma’s mental voice was—amused, and something else, something it took Hinata a minute to identify as impressed. _He called everyone,_ he said. _We were just closest._

Hinata blinked. _What do you mean, everyone? If they weren’t in the same quadrant, he can’t—_

Kenma did the thing, again, stopping his thought in his tracks. _You were dying,_ he said, into silence. _I don’t think ‘can’t’ applied._

Hinata shook his head to clear the last images that Kenma had sent him, his eyes finding Kuroo. He’d moved—perched now upright in the doorway, molded to it like it was made for him. “I—I was dying?”

Kuroo ran a hand through his hair. “Barely caught you,” he admitted. “Kageyama slowed your bleeding but he had to slow your heart to do it.” He regarded Hinata curiously. “Your body must really trust him. That’s crazy.”

Hinata blinked. “Sure,” he said.

Kuroo laughed, ducking his head to make it a soft, private thing, and Hinata knew he wasn’t laughing at him, but at whatever was going on behind his eyes. He frowned. He’d never had to deal with knowing Kagayema was in someone else’s head, telling them _jokes_ or something, before.

“How long until I’m okay?” he asked, which for some reason only made Kuroo laugh _harder,_ and he drew his eyebrows down as far as they would go on his face. “ _What?”_

_“_ You,” Kuroo said, chuckling, and gestured from Hinata to his temple. “You two, you—at the same time.” He shook his head and subsided. “Geez, I—“

_I thought me and the Cat were bad,_ Kenma murmured along with him, a little smugly.

_Show-off,_ Hinata said, but it came off more laughing than accusative. 

_It’ll be a couple days,_ Kenma told him. 

“Days?” Hinata asked in dismay.

Kuroo stretched his arms up above his head. His joints rolled in place in ways that made no sense, his limbs curved like maybe he was made of willow rather than bone. “You’re not even going to ask how he fixed you?” he asked. “It’s extremely impressive.”

From outside the den there was a weird, warbling cry, like an owl surprised in the middle of the day. Kuroo’s eyes lit up, his face splitting in a grin.

_Oh good,_ Kenma said dryly, but he wasn’t really displeased. _Bokuto-san’s here._

“That was fast,” Kuroo said, as if in answer, and started swinging away down the tree.

_Maybe he was already on his way,_ Kenma suggested, like he’d forgotten he wasn’t in Kuroo’s head, but Hinata’s.

“Um,” Hinata said, “Kenma says—“ but it was too late, Kuroo was making a weird, warbling hoot of his own and then he was gone.

_Don’t worry,_ Kenma said, _he heard me,_ and Hinata didn’t know if he meant because he’d passed the message through Kageyama or just that Kuroo knew him well enough to know what he would’ve said. 

_I don’t understand,_ he said, feeling lost and weirdly lonely. _How was I dying? That thing barely touched me, and I only fell about six feet._

_Six feet onto a rock that took a chunk out of your side,_ Kenma said conversationally, _but that’s not what was killing you. Look._

He called up the image of Hinata in the corridor between the trees again. Hinata frowned. _How are we seeing this, anyway?_ he asked. _You weren’t there, how do you know what happened?_

_You know there used to be cameras everywhere, right?_ Kenma asked. _They were always supposed to be supplementary to the video feeds the AIs would provide, but they were there in case something went wrong?_

_Sure, I guess,_ Hinata said, though he’d honestly never thought about it.

_Kuroo and I have been fixing them,_ Kenma said, with more than a small flicker of pride. _You’re lucky we’d already been in the area where this happened. It’s kind of a pet project._

_No way,_ Hinata said, _that’s so cool! So your scientists can see all this?_

Kenma sent him an amused negative. _We still haven’t worked out screens,_ he said. _But the raw video is saved in the network, so I—and the other AI, presumably—can access it and show you ourselves. Now look._

He directed Hinata’s attention not to the static image of his own body but to the corpse at his side. Hinata shuddered, not wanting to look at the thing, but Kenma nudged his attention toward it, inexorable. 

It was still human-shaped—two legs, two arms, a head—but its skin was the deep red-purple-black-yellow of heavy bruising or even heavier burns, cracked and oozing pitch-like blood. It had no hair to speak of, and what Hinata could see of its face was collapsed in on itself, like Hinata’s knife—still thrust through the back of its skull—had punctured it, letting out all the air.

_Gross,_ Hinata thought, absurdly. _Gross, gross, gross, gross—_

_Don’t vomit,_ Kenma warned, and he might not have had Kageyama’s synch with him but he’d done _something_ to make Hinata’s body listen.

His nausea receded. _What the heck_ , he asked.

_Sorry,_ Kenma said softly, and he sounded truly regretful. _I kind of had to do a lot to make you okay again._

Hinata wished he had a body so he could stare at him. _What does that mean?_

Kenma directed his attention to the thing’s right hand, which lay closest to Hinata’s left ankle—the ankle that Hinata was pretty certain had been broken, had felt it pop and snap in the thing’s grip, but which now only ached dully, not the shooting discomfort of a broken bone. In the picture, there was something—a shadow?—stretching from the thing’s fingers to his skin, and—Hinata squinted—up his leg, a little bit. 

Kenma set the image in motion again, and Hinata blinked, and then stared. What he’d taken for the mixing of his blood with the green moss was actually his blood _going black—_ black and thick like the creature’s. Kageyama had hauled him up out of it, must have seen and panicked and pulled him away, again, and again, every time he started to fall and every time his blood started to pool.

He felt sick—in his stomach, in his heart—and Kenma let the picture go, fading away a little bit, giving him space to feel. Hinata appreciated that, but it wasn’t what he needed.

_Get Kuroo back,_ he said, suddenly very, very tired. _I want to talk to Kageyama._

_Not yet_ , Kenma told him. _Right now you need to sleep, and I need to help your body help itself._

Hinata tried to ask what that meant, but the world was already slipping away again, and he slept.

+

He woke up once, at night, to Kenma still in his head, doing something deep in his hip that made it hot and itchy.

+

He woke up again, during some other day. Kuroo was standing with someone else in the doorway—it took Hinata a minute to realize the second person was there, they were standing so close, one silhouette merging into two against the sun; someone whose face Hinata can’t make out with his hands in Kuroo’s hair.

He reached for Kenma, but sleep took him first.

+

Kageyama was back in his head again when he woke up for a third time. That was the first thing he noticed, and he sent him a wave of— _stuff,_ jumbled up sleep-garbled information and feeling that Kageyama would have to interpret on his own because he was too distracted by the second thing he noticed, which was Nishinoya, perched at his bedside and grinning tearily at him.

“N-Noya-senpai?” He asked weakly, “what—what are you doing here?”

Noya raised his eyebrows at him. “Your partner sent out a distress call,” he said, “and we came running. You just missed Tsukishima—he saw you stirring and was out of here like a shot, as if anyone in the world doesn’t already know he worries worse than anybody’s mother.”

“As bad as my little sis,” Hinata agreed, and tried to sit up a little. 

Noya pushed him back with a gentle hand. “Hey, woah,” he said. “Stay there, you’re, you’re good there.” There was a vulnerable, shaky little note to his voice, so Hinata obeyed.

He did make a face at him, though. “Now who’s worse than a mother?”

Noya ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, yeah.”

Hinata studied him. He looked—despite his shaking hands and the little worried lines around his mouth that had yet to clear—he looked _better,_ like maybe he’d actually gotten some sleep this century, like he wasn’t balanced on a too-thin branch in high winds.

_“_ Hey,” said Hinata. “You and Asahi-san are talking again, huh.”

Noya stared at him, bright-eyed, and nodded.

Hinata grinned wide. “Worth iiit,” he sing-songed, and Noya gave a watery shout of a laugh and punched him hard in the shoulder.

“Y-you stupid, you _asshole,_ what were you thinking, how is Kageyama supposed to keep you safe for us if you won’t let him, huh?” He punched Hinata again, his tiny fist curled loose, and then brushed his knuckles up and down Hinata’s bicep. “What were you even thinking about that was so secret?”

_Yeah_ , said Kageyama, as if it had only just occurred to him to wonder, _what were you thinking about—_

Hinata felt himself blush bright, almost slammed his walls up again around the memory of the weird, embarrassed fluttering of his stomach, his stupid adolescent repetition of Kageyama’s name, the hopeless, sentimental wish to have him forever, in the flesh. But. There was new danger out there, and if he didn’t come clean with—whatever all of this was, whatever it was that this whole thing with Kageyama made him feel, he would only try harder to hide it, and this would only happen again.

Carefully, he didn’t put up any walls; carefully, he let it sit, in full view, flicked a terribly, impossibly nervous _take the emotion, too_ Kageyama’s way, and then tried not to hyperventilate.

To Noya, he said, “It doesn’t matter,” in a tiny squeak of a voice.

Noya laughed, startled. “What the—“ he stopped, his eyes flickering far away for a moment and then narrowing. “Apparently,” he said, slow and suspicious, “I should leave. Right now.”

Hinata covered his face with his hands, his cheeks burning. “Yeah,” he said weakly. “Um. Probably.”

Noya poked him hard in his uninjured side. “You’re gonna tell me what’s up,” he warned, and then, wicked: “also, enjoy!”

And then he was gone, and Hinata was left with the unbearable, waiting silence of the boy in his head.

He swallowed.

He waited. He twitched his toes. He worried his nails with his teeth. He tugged his hair out over his forehead and down his nose, trying to bite at the tips before giving up with a snap of his teeth. _Kag—_

_What am I supposed to do with this?_ Kageyama asked, so suddenly that Hinata flinched.

“Um,” he said. “I don’t know, I—“

_Unfair,_ Kageyama said, _it’s—you’re._ He stopped.

Hinata took a breath. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.” He stared up at the ceiling. “We’re not so good, huh. At—words, even with you in my head and all.”

He expected Kageyama to bridle, but he just said, _Yeah. I guess not._

Hinata took another long, steadying breath. “So,” he said. “If—if it didn’t have to be words. If you weren’t in my head. If you—the, the you in the case, with the body and everything—what would you do?”

Kageyama was silent for a moment, drawn in on himself, and then—

It was like when he’d shown Hinata the lion, only it wasn’t visual—or not _only_ visual. Because Kageyama was hooked into Hinata’s muscles, his nerves, he could— _feel,_ as well, kind of; could feel a pressure on his chest like, like a hand, could see the boy from the tube sitting at the edge of the bed, simultaneously with no pressure at all, simultaneously with empty air. Kageyama’s features were shifting, shifting, never settling, smaller than he looked in the cylinder, less muscled, and he knew he was seeing not Kageyama as he had been but Kageyama as he saw himself. Self-image pushed outward from Kageyama’s brain through Hinata’s to sit in front of him like a mirage, hazy, longing. His eyes were open, and—they were so so _dark,_ Kageyama’s eyes, black-grey-blue like the wings of a crow.

Hinata swallowed, swallowed again, and waited.

Hesitant—maybe working out how to do this—the image of Kageyama leaned forward. Hinata felt-not-felt the bed dip with his weight, felt-not-felt cool, dry fingertips on his jaw. Kageyama’s eyes fluttered closed, and there was an illusion of breath against Hinata’s mouth, little hot puffs as Kageyama breathed nervously—Hinata could _feel_ how nervous he was, his nervousness and Hinata’s own humming tension combining to fill his whole body with a trembling sort of warmth. Forgetting, willing himself to forget, he raised a hand, wanting to tangle his fingers in the hair at the base of Kageyama’s skull, tug and tug and pull him forward and in.

For an impossible second he felt short soft strands against his fingertips, even softer skin with muscle and bone beneath, and then—it was gone, Kageyama was gone, from in front of him if not from his head, and his fingers closed on empty air, his lips parting in the wake of nothing at all.

“Wh-what the hell,” he said, and it came out as one shaky, explosive breath. “Why—“

_I can’t exactly conjure up the next part,_ Kageyama snapped, his voice tight with embarrassment. _I don’t know what it feels like to kiss anybody!_

Hinata opened his hand again, stared at his fingers. “Oh,” he said, and drew his knees up to his chest. He tilted his forehead against them. “Neither do I.”

_I know, idiot_ , Kageyama pointed out, but it was gentled. No fire.

“I’m, um. Glad you don’t,” Hinata said quietly.

_Why?_

Hinata pressed his burning face to his knees. _Because,_ he said, not wanting to trust this part to his voice in case Noya or Kuroo or anyone was listening. _This way I can kiss you when you’re back in your body and it’ll be a first for both of us._

The surge of embarrassment and longing he felt from Kageyama was so intense it made him flop over on his side, but the stuff that followed it—uncertainty, regret, guilt—made him sit up again, blinking. “What?” he asked. “Don’t—don’t you want to come back?”

_Of course I want to,_ Kageyama said fiercely. _You don’t think I wanna see you, really see you, not in pools and lakes and stupid badly lit mirrors, you don’t think I dream about touching you_ _—_

Hinata made a tiny noise, and Kageyama cut himself off with a matching, more incoherent one, and—it was amazing, what knowing he had a body meant for Hinata’s perception of him. There was so much stuff he did that made so much more sense when he pictured it on a face, or in a voice. “You—you can dream?” he asked, interested, because it was safer than asking anything else.

Kageyama—unconsciously, maybe—sent him a flicker of gratitude. _Of course,_ he said, hiding behind his scorn. _I can block myself off from you just like you can from me, only I’m better at it._

“Shut up,” said Hinata, but he didn’t mean it. He swallowed, stretching his legs out in front of him. “So—why. Why did you feel so—weird, about being brought back?”

Kageyama was silent for a while, and Hinata got worried that he’d gone somewhere, or was sulking, or was going to stop answering his questions like he had last time, before the update. But finally he said, _I don’t think I can—help, as much, out there. And with that thing that nearly killed you—I. I need to keep you safe, and I can do that best here._

“I don’t care,” Hinata said stubbornly. “You can protect me just fine out here, and I can protect you — you’ll get used to your body again and we can fight together, side by side, you’ll see, you and me and Noya and Asahi and Tsukishima and Yamaguchi—“ He stopped, remembering Daichi’s voice: _Yamaguchi’s a special case_. “Maybe not Yamaguchi,” he said slowly. “Kageyama, do you—do you know what’s wrong with him?”

_No,_ said Kageyama, and this time he was telling the truth. _But I think…_

Hinata waited, slowly stretching himself forward so he could touch his toes. His back—cramped from spending so long in bed—screamed at him. “Kageyamaaa,” he prompted.

_I think it has something to do with the thing that attacked you,_ Kageyama said. _When we get updates there’s sometimes like. Files. In the computer Sugawara-san uses to back up our memories, things he’s been looking at, and this time there was something in there with pictures, and I assumed it was old pre-Dome history stuff but—but there was a file with Yamaguchi’s name in the same folder, and the pictures were. They were of people like the thing that attacked you, all—burned and mangled or whatever._

“Shit,” Hinata breathed, wrapping his hands around his ankles and leaning his head down as close to his knees as he could. “You think Daichi and Suga know what that thing was?”

Kuroo swung himself through the door. “‘Scuse me, kids,” he said, “sorry to interrupt, but your friends are making noise about taking you back to Karasuno and Kitten says it’s probably fine but he needs to check you out to make sure.” He raised an eyebrow at Hinata, folded as far in half as possible. “He also says you should definitely not be doing that.”

Hinata straightened up, making a face at him. “I feel fine, just sore ‘cause you won’t let me _do_ anything.”

Kageyama said, _I think so. Ask Kenma if there’s anything in the Nekoma or Fukurodani networks about it,_ and Hinata sent him a flicker of agreement before sighing and tugging out his plug, exchanging it for the cat-faced one that Kuroo handed over.

_Shouyo,_ Kenma greeted, and Hinata relaxed. He liked being used to Kenma, liked that his quiet presence was familiar now, brilliant and warm. They couldn’t synch the way he and Kageyama could—he had no idea how he would deal with Kenma in his head on a hunt—but. It felt right, being in that gorgeous room with that gorgeous little presence in his head.

Once again, he wondered what Kenma had looked like. _Kenma,_ he said, _do you wanna be human again?_

_I am human,_ Kenma said,deliberately misunderstanding.

_I mean your body, silly._

Kenma was silent for a minute, and then he said, _Not really._

Hinata blinked, surprised. _Really? Why not?_

When Kageyama wanted to shrug, he sent Hinata a kind of muscle memory, something that made Hinata’s own shoulders twitch. When Kenma shrugged he sent the feeling of what a shrug conveyed, wordless and impossible to perfectly describe even if he’d used them, but somehow divorced entirely from motion as well. _I never liked my body,_ he said. _It never really suited me, and I never really suited it. I gave it up for a reason, why would I take it back?_

_I dunno,_ Hinata said slowly, _to be close to the people you love?_

He—self-consciously—didn’t think about Kuroo, but Kenma unburied him in his mind without any effort at all, like someone smoothing away dust from an old book, or sand from a bottle in a riverbed; someone who has seen the shape of something and wants to look closer.

He answered Hinata’s image of Kuroo—Kuroo the way Hinata knew him, perched high and alert and poised, catching sight of him watching and grinning downward—with another image. The room they were in now, but half-finished, the walls more closed and private in the night. Tools and wood-shavings scattered around the room, and two figures in the bed: young and graceless in sleep, tangled together like they’d been thrown there by sea or storm. The taller of the boys had Kuroo’s wild black hair; his long, coltish limbs were thrown carelessly around the smaller figure, who had his own dark head buried hard against the intersection of Kuroo’s shoulder and his neck. Hinata couldn’t see much of him—the knobs of his spine pushing out against his thin shirt, a few strands of his long hair wound between Kuroo’s fingers—but there was something in the curled, inward smallness of him that let Hinata know it was Kenma.

_I_ am _close to the people I love,_ he said simply, without apparent embarrassment. _Closer than I was when I had a body—closer than I could be if I went back to it._

The image dissolved, and Hinata felt—drained, a little bit sad. _You don’t miss it?_ he asked, because to him that tangled-up-physicality, that skin against skin, that was—the _ideal,_ what he longed for, and to have Kenma dismiss it so intensely as not enough, trade it for the much stranger closeness of mind and mind, it. He shook his head.

Kenma hesitated. _I think Kuroo does,_ he admitted, _but—he has other people for his physical needs. All I ever wanted was to be—_ he sent a feeling that wasn’t quite ‘engulfed’ or ‘surrounded’ or ‘essential’ or ‘needed’ but had dizzying shades of each, a deeply satisfying sort of entirely nonphysical intimacy that Hinata had never felt anything _close_ to, and then just as abruptly tugged it out of Hinata’s mind again, like he didn’t want Hinata to remember it too well, like Tanaka flashing one of his old mouldering playing cards in the middle of a magic trick.

_Woah,_ said Hinata, put right back in that place of awe he’d been in when they’d first met.

Kenma sent him a little smile, and with it a picture of his face—so much more certain than Kageyama’s self-conception was, so much clearer: a soft kind of face, elfin, with wide-set green-gold eyes, peering at Hinata from behind a curtain of hair—not dark, like it had been in the memory of him and Kuroo, but a pale gold Hinata’s not sure is hair at all. He remembers his first impression of Kenma—silence and then thought, like a single shaft of light slipping through curtains.

Hinata’s throat was dry, so he cleared it, but he still didn’t feel like he should speak aloud. _You can’t’ve been an AI long, then,_ he said, _if you and Kuroo were kids together. Why’d you do it?_

It’s the question that—even still—he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask Kageyama. He wasn’t really sure what he was afraid of—the idea that he could be overstepping his bounds felt ridiculous, albeit newly ridiculous after this near-death and the new honesty between them that arose from it—and he didn’t think the answer itself would upset him. Probably. Maybe it was just that he didn’t want to _have_ to ask. He wanted Kageyama to come forward with it because he wanted Hinata to know. 

_The same reason as everybody else,_ Kenma said, quiet, and Hinata could kind of—feel him, sending little questing tendrils of sensation through his limbs, making sure he was healed. _We were needed._

_Kageyama said you should check the Nekoma and Fukurodani networks for information on the thing that attacked me,_ Hinata said, remembering. _He says Suga and Daichi know about it, so your scientists might, as well._

Kenma acknowledged him, continuing in his journey through Hinata’s body, and finally he made a little sound of satisfaction. _I’ll have Kuroo tell your King to treat you easy,_ he said, and there was nothing mocking in the title he gave Kageyama, so Hinata didn’t bristle. _You should be able to get back to Karasuno._

“We’re not going back,” Hinata said, startled into speech. “Noya and Tsukishima can come if they want, but we’re going to Seijoh to see Oikawa.”

Kuroo—in the corner, still, or maybe in the corner again, sometimes talking to Kenma took up too much of Hinata’s attention for him to properly watch the room—uncurled a little and raised an eyebrow. “Oikawa? Why?” He smirked. “Curious as to where the King got his bad attitude?”

Hinata stared at him. “What?”

Kuroo winced. “Apparently,” he said, half under his breath, “I shouldn’t have said that.” He tapped on his temple in annoyance. “Okay, okay,” he protested, “I get it, sorry.”

Hinata didn’t understand what was going on, so he ignored it. “We’re not going to Karasuno,” he said again.

Kuroo raised an eyebrow, appraising, and then sighed. “Then—how long do you need, Kenma?”

He wasn’t really looking at Hinata, and Kenma said, _tell him two more days._

Hinata met Kuroo’s eyes squarely. “One day,” he said firmly.

If Kuroo knew he was lying he made no sign of it. “Alright. I’ll let Nishinoya and Tsukishima know.”

_Fine,_ Kenma said, _but you’d better let me get to work, then._ Kenma brushed a sigh over Hinata’s mind, and sleep followed in its wake. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uhh hi! Sorry this chapter took so long but I think I'm pretty happy with it, as always please let me know what you think


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“He’s—fixing him,” Kuroo said. “Like—helping his body to heal.” His mouth twisted a little. “You just missed him, actually—he was awake about an hour before you got here.”_
> 
>  
> 
> _Hinata was curled on his side, his face pressed into the sheets, and through the curls of his hair Tsukishima had seen the end of his AI-plug, not Kageyama’s but the smiling, sinister face of the Cat._
> 
> It’s more than that, though, _said Yamaguchi in Tsukishima’s head, his voice low with horror._ He’s doing something else, I can kind of—feel it. He’s like hooked into the whole network for some reason.

Tsukishima held himself taut and waiting, his body filled with a terrible sort of readiness even as his mind—and Yamaguchi within it—tried to convince him there was nothing wrong. He watched Kuroo pace, his face lined with worry, and wondered if it was his own concern or the King’s, showing through in the expression of his temporary partner.

“What’s he doing?” Nishinoya asked, and Tsukishima was grateful because it meant he didn’t have to. His fellow hunter was crouched in the corner of the strange, chaotic outpost den that Kageyama’s new coordinates had led them to, staring—as Tsukishima could not—at Hinata’s body on the bed in the center of the room.

He’d looked at him when they first climbed up, lying pale and drained in a tangle of real, woven sheets—like something from a tale set before the end of the larger World, a storybook prince with porcelain skin and hair like fire, asleep in his bed in this odd little tower room, waiting. For.

“He’s—fixing him,” Kuroo said. “Like—helping his body to heal.” His mouth twisted a little. “You just missed him, actually—he was awake about an hour before you got here.”

Hinata was curled on his side, his face pressed into the sheets, and through the curls of his hair Tsukishima had seen the end of his AI-plug, not Kageyama’s but the smiling, sinister face of the Cat.

 _It’s more than that, though,_ said Yamaguchi in Tsukishima’s head, his voice low with horror. _He’s doing something else, I can kind of—feel it. He’s like hooked into the whole network for some reason._

Yamaguchi was half of why Tsukishima wasn’t looking at Hinata anymore. His AI had taken one look at the strange, black-blue-green of the filmy _stuff_ on Hinata’s feet and ankles and shied away like a deer away from a torch. When Tsukishima questioned him, he found a resistance like nothing Yamaguchi had ever showed him before, a firm wall of _no, i’m not talking about that_ that he found to his utter surprise he could do nothing about at all.

“What else?” Tsukishima asked Kuroo, quick and harsh.

Kuroo raised his eyebrows at him. “Else?”

Tsukishima ran his fingers over the catches that would release the spear still strapped to his back. He hated this, hated being so on edge, hated having to deal with Kuroo under circumstances like these—he never really knew how to classify the Nekoma hunter; they weren’t exactly _friends_ , partially because Kuroo seemed to make it his absolute mission to get under his skin in all their interactions, but they weren’t exactly. Anything else, either. Kuroo’s relentless pursuit of Tsukishima’s anger had resulted in more than one physical confrontation, and one frustratingly good, frustratingly desperate moment with Tsukishima’s back against a tree and Kuroo’s mouth against his jaw, against his cheek, against his mouth.

There was very little of the teasing, frustrating hunter Tsukishima knew in Kuroo’s stance now, even less of the strangely endearing fool he played when not on the hunt. (Or perhaps the fool was the truth, and the sharp-smirked hunter the part he played). Now he was all seriousness, all competent worry, and Tsukishima—didn’t understand _this_ Kuroo, and he didn’t understand anything else that was happening, and Hinata was—

“The other stuff the Cat’s doing to Hinata,” he snapped.

Kuroo licked his lips, and then nodded. “He’s—you saw the stuff on Hinata’s ankle?”

Yamaguchi went cool and silent, and Tsukishima said, “Yes.”

“It was,” Kuroo swallowed, a fluttering of his long throat. “Changing him. Into what, we don’t know, but we thought it was best not to wait and find out.”

 _I can kind of see what he’s doing,_ Yamaguchi said abruptly, his quiet, reassuring voice—so constant a companion to Tsukishima’s caustic worry that it was indistinguishable from the rest of his automatic functions; Tsukishima’s heartbeat wove with Yamaguchi’s voice to become the song that he thought of as living—now fractured and distant. Tsukishima tore at the skin around one of his thumbnails, over and over, until he bled. _He’s—rewriting him._

“You know how the animals here have accelerated growth? Part of that is also accelerated healing from wounds, accelerate metabolic function,” Kuroo continued. “And like, we don’t have to intervene with them anymore, it’s written into them, like, evolutionarily? Kenma’s stealing the patterns for how that works from the computers at Fukurodani, the original data on the animals we experimented on, way at the very beginning of things.” He smiled, a little, grim and small and proud. “I can’t say I really get it, but he’s basically—teaching that growth pattern to Hinata’s cells, so that they remember what he’s supposed to be, not what that stuff is trying to make him into. Making him rewrite himself over himself before that thing can get any further than it has.”

Nishinoya’s head snapped around to stare at him. “But—Hinata won’t age fast, right? He won’t—Kuroo, if you do this, his lifespan—“

“If we didn’t do it he’d be dead right now,” Kuroo interrupted him, his voice deadly calm. “Trust me, this was the only choice.” He flicked his eyes to Tsukishima’s. “Better we maybe lose him in twenty years than have lost him yesterday.”

Tsukishima closed his eyes against—all of it. _Yamaguchi._

Yamaguchi avoided him, a little, but Tsukishima waited, and finally he said, _yes?_

 _I’m going to look at him,_ he said. _And so are you. You don’t have to tell me anything, but you do have to look. Okay?_

He felt Yamaguchi brace himself to refuse, but he opened up his walls a little further—let him see his own fear, his own confusion, and Yamaguchi’s opposition melted away. _Tsukki,_ he said, his voice soft and real and close again.

Tsukishima swallowed. _Ready?_

Assent, and Tsukishima turned his eyes to Hinata’s prone form.

Sometimes his vision went weird, when Yamaguchi was concentrating really hard on something. He thought it might be because his own vision was pretty bad—the lenses he’d cobbled together from two other ancient pairs were ill-suited to his actual needs; they sharpened his vision some but one eye was much more magnified than the other and if he wore them for any amount of time without Yamaguchi ameliorating the effects they gave him a horrible, swimming kind of headache that rolled through his body like nausea. They corrected _enough_ , though, that Yamaguchi could do the rest.

But sometimes Yama got over-excited or over-invested and kind of—forgot how much to sharpen it, or let go of his control a little so he could look, too, even though he didn’t have eyes of his own, and it was like his vision slipped and doubled and maybe Yamaguchi was just—using his eyes completely, pulling them out of Tsukki’s grasp a little so he could examine the smears of black that were curling up Hinata’s ankle.

They looked like soot, if soot had formed itself into the ghost of a hand—or if a hand had been pressed against his skin, but burned away. Burn-black fingers wrapped around his ankle, and then— _into_ it, sinking into his skin, and the veins that ran up his leg pulsed a horrible blue-purple. Tsukishima and Yamaguchi watched as one as the too-dark bruise pulled back a little, down his ankle, retreated from the blood-filled pathways to Hinata’s heart.

Tsukishima swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed, and then realized it wasn’t his own roiling, acidic fear that he felt, but Yamaguchi’s.

 _You know this_ , he said, not taking his eyes off the rise and fall of Hinata’s side, his shoulder, the tiny flutter of his nostrils. The smallest possible signifiers of life. _You know what this is._

Yamaguchi didn’t lie to him. It had never really occurred to him until this moment that Yamaguchi might be able to lie to him, but any fears he had on that front were immediately soothed, because he felt Yamaguchi struggle desperately for something to say that was convincing at all before he said, _yeah, I do._

“How is that possible?” Tsukishima said aloud.

“You’d have to ask Kenma,” Kuroo began, but Tsukishima shook his head.

“No,” he said, “No, I mean—Yamaguchi says he knows what this is, but I’m his first—he didn’t have a hunter before me, and I’ve never seen anything _like_ this—“

Kuroo looked surprised. “I mean, that’s obvious, right? He saw them when he was still human.”

Nishinoya groaned and dropped his head into his hands. Tsukishima just—stared at Kuroo, his mind going flat, his thoughts drawn back like a wave with the breath in his lungs, leaving blank, hard-packed sand in their wake. “When he was _what?_ ”

Kuroo blinked at him. “You guys didn’t know they were human?”

“You _did?_ ” Tsukishima snapped, and then, to Nishinoya, “ _You_ did?”

“Only like, three days ago,” Noya said quickly. “I promise, I would have told you, but Hinata said Daichi and Suga-san told him not to, that there was something different about Yamaguchi—“

Tsukishima shook his head, sharp, and Noya cut himself off, his lower lip between his teeth. “Sorry,” he said softly, but Tsukishima was turning himself inward. He wanted nothing so much as to throw all his anger and fear and confusion at Yamaguchi wholesale, demand answers, but that wasn’t how they operated.

 _Why?_ he asked instead, keeping his mental voice cool and calm. Yamaguchi might still be able to feel how scared and shaking he was but he knew if he let it show it would only make his AI panic. They cut a sort of balance, in his head—each able to feel the other’s emotion, but politely pretending that all they had was what they intentionally gave; a kind of trusting dance that had started out tenuous but was now as natural as breathing.

Yamaguchi was silent for a long moment. _I guess,_ he said slowly, _you were going to find out soon anyway. Daichi-senpai and Sugawara-senpai would have told you as soon as we got back, now that another one showed up._

Tsukishima clenched his fists. _Another one? You’ve seen the things that did this before?_

Again, assent—like someone who has forgotten how to nod doing it anyway. _Yeah,_ Yamaguchi said. _They’re what killed me._

+

Nishinoya watched as Tsukishima walked over to Hinata’s prone form, his lips shifting again as he spoke to his AI.

 _Poor Yamaguchi,_ Asahi said in his head, soft and sympathetic.

Noya blinked. _What? Why?_

A frantic sort of internal motion, like a rapid headshake. _Sorry I—didn’t mean to say that, I’m._

Noya sent him soothing vibes. _I know,_ he said, _we’re all wearing a little thin._

Before he could press his AI further—maybe he hadn’t meant to say it, but he still had and it wasn’t fair for him to just leave it there—Tsukishima swayed on his feet like someone had punched him in the side of the head, knocked him off balance. He reached out a hand to grab something to steady himself but met only empty air, and Kuroo slid in under his flailing arm and helped him sit down on the end of the bed, muttering something under his breath.

Tsukishima’s face was bloodless, his eyes gone haunted and strange, and he didn’t look at Kuroo as the other hunter stepped back from him. 

“Yo,” Kuroo said, snapping his fingers in front of his face. “Hey, Tsukki—“

“Let him be,” Noya said quietly. “He’ll tell us what’s up eventually.”

Kuroo frowned at him, but left off bothering the other hunter, leaning again against the doorway. He _fit_ there, somehow, and Noya saw that the wall actually curved outward to make a space for him to curl himself into that was the exact breadth of his shoulders, although it was a little too short, like it had been carved before he got so tall. Still, it was like he was meant to be there, somehow—a vantage point that gave him full view of both the room and the world outside. Watchful. Protective.

“You knew?” Noya asked, feeling like he should almost be whispering—with Tsukishima so far inside his own head it felt like he was alone here, intruding on some private space in a way he hadn’t been when they first arrived. “About their bodies?

Kuroo stared at the floor. “Yeah,” he said, just as quietly, “I was there when Kenma made his choice.”

Noya swallowed hard. He couldn’t even— _imagine_ that, imagine watching Asahi going into that cylinder, imagine living with the knowledge that someone you cared about that much had given you up. 

_That’s not what it is,_ Asahi said. _That’s not what happened._

Noya ignored him.

“Choice,” said Tsukishima, sudden. “It was a choice for him?”

Kuroo cocked his head. “Yeah, dude,” he said, “it was a choice for all of them, I thought?”

Tsukishima let out a laugh like a fox bark, harsh and horrible. “Right.”

Kuroo and Noya watched him for a moment in shared, confused concern, and then Tsukishima stood up. “I’ll be outside,” he said, “I can’t—deal with both.”

Noya watched him go, his lip between his teeth. “Both what?” he asked Kuroo, who only shrugged.

They stayed like that, in impatient, careful stillness, until there was a strange kind of birdcall from outside and Kuroo unfolded himself. “Bokuto’s back,” he said idly, as if Noya should know who that was. “Wanna come meet him?”

Tsukishima was nowhere to be found when they slid down the tree. Instead, there was a muscular, grinning hunter with two swooping points of greyblack hair that gave him the appearance of a great horned owl, waiting for them on the forest floor. Noya wondered idly what he used to keep his hair up—his own mixture of pine sap, hot water, and lemon was a work in progress and terribly time-intensive, and more often than not these days he just didn’t bother. 

The hunter greeted Kuroo with a strange combination of a hug, a slap on the back, and a kiss on the cheek, somehow managing to wrap him entirely up in and then release him in the space of a second. He eyed Noya like he was considering doing the same to him, and then settled for a bright-eyed smile and a salute. “Hey.”

“Hey,” said Noya, “uh—I’m Nishinoya, from Karasuno.”

“Bokuto,” said Bokuto, and tapped his temple. “Akaashi’s up here. Wanna meet him? Best AI in the Wood.”

Noya blinked at him, shocked. Who offered to share their AI so casually? He knew Kageyama was in Kuroo’s head right now but that was by necessity, and he didn’t really—relish the idea of taking Asahi out of his port, right now, not when they were both so fragile. “Uh,” he said, “that’s—that’s okay, by proxy is fine for now.”

Bokuto shrugged. “Suit yourself! You’re missing out, guy’s got a voice like honey.” He laughed, somehow at himself and at the world and at whatever was going on in his own head at once. “Because it’s true!” he announced, presumably to his AI.

Kuroo shook his head and tapped Bokuto hard in the center of the forehead, like he was bringing him back down to earth. “Your mission, babe.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Bokuto, and his boisterousness didn’t vanish, exactly, but it subsided under a layer of cheerful calm. “Perimeter’s secure, no sign of anything like whatever hurt that poor kid. Seems we’re safe for now. If you could have that scowly kid in your head let everyone back at Fukurodani know, that’d be great—his mass yelling got everybody pretty worked up, and Akaashi’s range isn’t that good. Because _no one’s_ range is that good, damn.”

Kuroo nodded, and while he talked to Kageyama Noya asked Bokuto, “You’re from Fukurodani? You must know Yachi-san, then!”

Bokuto cocked his head. “Who?” he asked, and the resemblance to an owl was so strong that Noya chuckled, his mirth reinforced by a little warm wave of laughter from Asahi.

“Yachi,” he said, “short girl, blond, super cute, she went to stay with you guys for Harvest last, no, two years ago? Must’ve been for like six months at least.” 

Bokuto still looked blank, so Noya frowned and continued. “You guys had a really abundant Harvest, and we sent Yachi to help because she’s got such a green thumb?”

Bokuto shook his head. “No way,” he said, “I’d remember a green-thumbed blondie, and anyway our Harvest that year was _pitiful_ —some kind of blight got into like half our crops.” He shook his head. “We were pretty worried about it honestly, but this year we bounced back a little.”

“What?” Noya asked. “But Daichi said—“

“Daichi also never told you your AI had bodies,” Kuroo pointed out, narrowing his eyes. “That guy’s always had a lotta secrets.” He shook his head. “Although I think maybe he’s just keeping them for his pretty boyfriend—if there’s a mastermind there it’s Suga, not Daichi.”

 _Mastermind sounds so ominous,_ Asahi objected.

Noya looked back and forth between Bokuto and Kuroo, utterly baffled. “But the AI thing at least—maybe they had a reason, that’s like a big thing, but why would they possibly lie to us about where Yachi went? And if she didn’t go to you—“ he nodded to Bokuto, “and she wasn’t at Nekoma—“ he looked to Kuroo, who shook his head, “and she wasn’t with us, where did she go?”

“Did she say she went to Fukurodani?” Kuroo asked. “Why are you relying on Daichi about this?”

Noya blinked. “I—I think so,” he said, “but she got really sick right after and seemed kind of confused when I asked about it, I thought it was just from the travel or overworking or something. She’s kind of a spacey girl anyway, so I just.” He shrugged, feeling weird and guilty, like he should have known, should have followed up. “Takeda-sensei said maybe her fever messed with her memory,” he said, doubtful, now, of everyone.

Bokuto shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “all I know is she wasn’t with us.”

 _Asahi?_ Noya asked his AI, _do you know?_

Asahi seemed to consider something for a long moment. _You know what I was talking about, before? About how good you are at reading people, at understanding what they need?_

 _Sure,_ said Noya, _but what does that have to do with—_

 _I know the answer to your question,_ Asahi said simply, _and I won’t refuse if you ask again. But I have a friend who—when I think about her the way you think about people, I think she needs to tell you herself. Will you let me make that call?_

Noya bit his lip, frowning, but there was a bubble of pride in him, as well. _You fight dirty._

 _When I fight,_ Asahi said, _I do try to win._

Noya rolled his shoulders. “Fine,” he said aloud, feeling like he was signing a contract. “Fine.”

Kuroo raised an eyebrow at him. “Fine?”

“Fine,” Noya confirmed, and turned to go back inside.

“Fine,” Kuroo echoed to Bokuto, behind him.

“Fine!” Bokuto shot back, all fake huff. “ _Fine_.”

“Ugh, fiiiine,” said Kuroo, put-upon, and Noya shook his head in bemusement as he swung himself up into the sickroom where Hinata still lay. He crossed to his friend, running a gentle knuckle down the curve of his cheek.

“Wake up, okay?” he said softly. “There’s too much going on I don’t understand, and I need someone to be a dumb idiot with me.”

Hinata’s eyes shifted behind his eyelids, and Noya’s chest went tight with hope—but he only uncurled, a little, and slept on, his breathing too shallow, the shadows beneath his eyes too deep.

Noya sighed and returned to his perch, the pain in his chest not really easing.

When Tsukishima finally returned, Noya was still in his corner. He’d found a scrap of wood and was idly whittling away at it with his knife; there was something about this strange, beautiful little den that made him want to create. He liked making things but he always got too impatient, ended up carving too much away and then snapping the whole thing in half in frustration.

This time, though, he was tired enough that when Asahi nudged forward with a little bit of direction—guided the kind of strength he should exert in his hands, wordlessly showed him the path his blade should take, like a kind of meditative, creative version of the way they hunted—it was easy to just sit back and let him take over. It was kind of amazing, seeing what his hands could do with Asahi’s mind behind them, and in his idle, exhausted sort of trance he started thinking about Asahi’s hands—so much larger than his—turning the wood over gently, running his calloused thumbs over the cuts he’d made to check their smoothness, imagined them on his own hands, turning them over with the same careful concentration, thumbing over his wrists, his knuckles, his veins like woodgrain.

“Nishinoya,” said Tsukishima, startling him out of his daydreams. “Yamaguchi’s dead.”

Noya stared at him, disoriented and horrified. He didn’t look like he’d been crying, exactly—but there was something a little too soft around his eyes, around his mouth. “What? I—what?”

Tsukishima licked his lips. “He’s dead,” he said, “and Hinata’s dying.”

Noya hopped to his feet. “No,” he said firmly, staring up into Tsukishima’s face. “Hinata’s not gonna die. Kenma’s saving him, he’s almost fine—“

Tsukishima shook his head. “He showed me what they did to him,” he said, his voice low and horrible, “and—it’s—“

“Him? Which? Tsukishima, you’re not making any sense. How can Yamaguchi be dead if he’s in your head—“

“His body,” Tsukishima ground out. “His _body_ is dead, he was killed by whatever did that.” He stuck out an arm to point at Hinata without looking at him. “Those things, they— and then Ukai and Takeda-sensei pulled out his mind and. And gave it to me.” His voice broke, a little. “I can,” he started, but then shook his head as if dislodging something. “No. No. _He_ can. Remember it.”

Noya swallowed hard. _Poor Yamaguchi_ , Asahi repeated in his head, even softer this time. “God. Tsukki—“

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Tsukishima said, low and fierce. “Don’t. I’m just. Processing.”

Noya watched him for another minute, and then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Hinata’s still not gonna die, though.” He crossed to his friend, ran his eyes over his still form. “He’s stronger than that.”

“Yamaguchi was strong,” Tsukishima said dully. “He was strong and young and I think he had freckles.”

Nishinoya wanted to smile at that, but he couldn’t, quite—the muscles of his face didn’t seem to want to respond. _Asahi._

 _Yes_ , said Asahi immediately, like he’d been expecting it.

_Can you, like, check in—_

_No need,_ Asahi interrupted, _he’s waking up._

“Good,” said Tsukishima, abrupt, and then he turned on his heel and left.

“Hey,” Noya called, “don’t you want to—“ but Tsukishima was gone, and Hinata was uncurling, and Noya leapt to his bedside instead. 

Hinata always woke up with a snap, always came awake bleary but bursting with life. Now it was like someone had let him burn down to his coals—he had all the same brightness in his eyes, but it was almost feverish, and none of the strength in his bones.

“N-Noya-senpai?” He asked weakly, “what—what are you doing here?”

Noya raised his eyebrows at him. “Your partner sent out a distress call,” he said, “and we came running. You just missed Tsukishima—he saw you stirring and was out of here like a shot, as if anyone in the world doesn’t already know he worries worse than anybody’s mother.”

“As bad as my little sis,” Hinata agreed. He tried to sit up a little.

Noya stopped him, his heart rising into his throat at how weak he was. “Hey, woah. Stay there, you’re, you’re good there.”

Hinata grimaced at him. “Now who’s worse than a mother?”

Noya ran a hand through his hair, feeling his hand shaking. “Yeah, yeah.”

Hinata stared at him like he was underbrush that might be hiding small game. “Hey,” he said at last. “You and Asahi-san are talking again, huh.”

Noya stared right back, not asking how he knew—it must be written all over his face—and nodded.

Hinata grinned wide. “Worth iiit,” he sing-songed.

It hit Noya right in the chest, and he felt his eyes well up even as he laughed. He punched Hinata in the shoulder, disbelieving and overwhelmingly, impossibly relieved. “Y-you stupid, you asshole, what were you thinking, how is Kageyama supposed to keep you safe for us if you won’t let him, huh?” He punched Hinata again, less hard this time, didn’t want to stop touching him, stop reaffirming that he was solid. “What were you even thinking about that was so secret?”

Hinata went redder than Noya had ever seen him and squeaked, “it doesn’t matter!” in a voice rough with both sleep and embarrassment.

Noya laughed, startled. “What the—“ 

_Um,_ Asahi interrupted, his own voice so embarrassed—so lovely in its embarrassment—that Noya wanted to just. Hang out in it for a while, all of a sudden. _You should leave right now, probably._

“Apparently,” he said to Hinata, slow and suspicious, “I should leave. Right now.”

Hinata covered his face with his hands. “Yeah,” he said in a small voice. “Um. Probably.”

 _Yes,_ Asahi confirmed, still embarrassed.

Noya poked Hinata hard in his uninjured side. “You’re gonna tell me what’s up,” he warned, and then, wicked: “also, enjoy!” because he wasn’t an idiot—there were only so many things in the world Hinata would hide from his AI that would make him blush like _that._

He rose and snuck away, leaving Hinata both far away and inward at once but _alive_ , gloriously alive.

Asahi was still radiating embarrassment at him when they reached the forest floor, and—something else, too, some edge of bitterness, or.

 _Asahi_ , Noya said, startled, _are you jealous?_

The tide of emotion subsided a little as Asahi got himself under control. _Yeah,_ he said reluctantly. _I mean—a bit. Yeah._

 _Of what?_ Noya asked, carefully steering his way through a bunch of Big Thoughts without touching on any of them in particular. Speculation was dangerous—speculation led to him thinking too hard about whether he was jealous, too, and whether they were jealous of the same stuff, and. Yeah.

 _Courage,_ Asahi said softly. _And. Honesty._

Noya sighed and closed his eyes, leaning back against the base of the den-tree. Slowly—without letting himself think about it too much, extrapolate anything but the actuality of what he was doing—he built a picture of himself inside his own mind, one hand extended, palm up.

Asahi—after a moment’s hesitation—met him there. Real Asahi, cylinder-Asahi, tall and muscular and gentle-faced, his steps slow as his mind-self approached Noya’s. His hair—pulled back from his face in the cylinder—was free and long around his shoulders.

Noya concentrated on breathing right and on drinking him in and Asahi reached out to take his hand, his palm, his palm, his palm—the _idea_ of his palm warm and soft and calloused at once, and then he sank to his knees and pressed his face to Noya’s fingers and Noya’s throat closed up tight. He could feel Asahi’s forehead, his eyebrows, the sweep of his eyelashes against his skin.

 _I’m sorry,_ Asahi said.

Noya took a breath and realized his face—his real face, the one open to the world and to the wind—was wet with tears. _For what?_

 _For robbing you of me,_ Asahi said, in something that was halfway his voice and halfway Noya’s, and then, in a voice just his own, _for robbing me of you._

Noya pressed himself back against the rough bark of the tree until it hurt and cried and cried and cried.

+

They stayed for several days while Hinata slept. Noya, Tsukishima, and Kuroo took turns hunting while the other two stood watch over Hinata. Bokuto went back to Fukurodani, promising to keep in contact as best he could. Despite Hinata’s recovery, the air was uneasy; the weather remained fine but Noya felt very much as if he were trying to find his bearings in that sickening, swinging moment before the storm, when the wind came staccato from all directions at once like the world was a thousand living creatures all breathing out of sync.

Hinata woke several times, never for longer than a few minutes, and every time Tsukishima balked at Noya’s suggestion that he go see him.

“Why not?” he demanded, while the two of them were setting up a roasting spit for the rabbits Noya had caught that morning. “He knows you’re here, he knows you’re worried about him, why won’t you go see that he’s okay?”

Tsukishima didn’t meet his eyes for a long moment, and then he said, “You know how I said I was already going after him?”

Noya nodded, curious, his hands working to secure the ends of the spit without input from his mind.

“It’s because he wasn’t out hunting. He was headed straight north.” Tsukishima straightened, dusting the bits of twigs and bark from his hands. “You must have noticed the path he took out of camp made no sense.”

Noya nodded. “I did,” he said cautiously, “but I don’t get it. He’s going to Aobajousai?”

Tsukishima made a little humming noise. “Maybe,” he said. “But there’s another possibility.” He picked up a stick they’d snapped off from the spit and started drawing in the dirt. Noya crossed to him to watch.

Tsukishima drew a careful circle, and then divided it into four quadrants. “You know that moment of too much synchronization when you get your AI back from an update and you can’t really control what you see and what you say?”

Noya nodded, rueful. That moment had been a source of great embarrassment for him several times. Asahi—who tended to back tactfully off when he was embarrassed—shifted fondly forward instead, like he was leaning over Noya’s shoulder to look at Tsukishima’s map, and Noya ran a hand up his chest to touch the joint between his shoulder and his neck, feeling stupid and longing.

“Last update,” Tsukishima continued, “Yamaguchi showed me something by accident. A strange camp.” He drew an x, right in the middle of the map. “Here.”

Noya frowned. “A fifth camp?” He shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense, how would we not have known? There’d be hunters from there, and it’s so close to all the others.”

Tsukishima was staring at his map, expressionless. “It does make sense, though, tactically. A central encampment would be within range for all of the AI, and everyone could communicate through there. Kuroo said he and Kenma are fixing up the old surveillance systems, but the network’s so fragmented, like something took out a huge chunk of it.”

“Yeah,” said Noya, slowly, “but where are all the people?”

Tsukishima looked at him, silent.

Noya swallowed. “Did you ask Yamaguchi?”

Tsukishima nodded. “He won’t—“ he stopped himself. “No. I don’t think he can tell me, and I think I understand why, now. I think it’s too,” he licked his lips. “When you’re nothing but a brain, trauma can be—overwhelming.”

“Shit,” said Noya softly. “And you think Shouyo’s headed there?”

Tsukishima shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I know he found out about Kageyama before we found out about our AI. Who knows what else Sugawara-senpai said to him?”

 _Can we please stop casting Suga as some kind of evil genius?_ Asahi asked, kind of annoyed.

 _Maybe if he stopped keeping secrets from us,_ Noya countered.

Asahi was silent for a moment, and then he said tiredly, half-rebuke, _he’s only doing what he thinks is best._

 _Yeah, well, I happen to think it’s best if I know what the hell is happening in my life!_ Noya snapped, his patience with all of the mysteries wearing thin. _God, Asahi, do you have any idea what it’s like to suddenly realize that your whole world is completely different than you thought? And to have the one person you thought you shared everything with suddenly keep a thousand important secrets?_

Asahi drew away from him, silent, and Noya bit his lip so hard it bled. “I want to go home,” he said aloud. “I want to see Ryu and Natsu and Shimizu-san and make Daichi and Suga tell me what the hell is happening. I want to sleep in my own bed and not worry that my friends are dying or have been dead all along, I want—“ He pinched the bridge of his nose and got himself under control. “I want things to be _simple_ again.”

Tsukishima cocked his head at him, his eyes strange and blank. “Things are as simple as they ever have been. We fight to eat until we die.” He scuffed his toes through the map in the dust. “The world is over,” he said. “It’s ended. Done. Left us behind. This,” he gestured at the clearing, “is all we get.”

He turned and slunk into the gathering dusk, vanishing between the trees sideways like he was slipping away between realms.

Noya shook his head. Tsukishima was wrong; there was more to life than that. They had something to work towards. The rest of the world was still out there, and someday—maybe not soon, but someday—they’d be back, and when they were, they’d need the stores of food that the hunters were keeping safe for them. They had a purpose.

He turned his attention to his rabbits, sliding them onto the spit. The sharpened wood passed smoothly through raw flesh, grounding him in the bloody and the real.

+

Hinata woke up feeling incredible.

 _Woah_ , he said to Kenma, who was sitting in the back of his head, more present than he ever had been before, a little bright point of pride. _What did you do to me? I feel amazing._

That little shy shrugging feeling again. _I just taught you to be you again._

 _Well,_ said Hinata happily, _you did an awesome job._

Kenma sent him a little squirming pleased feeling, and then–maybe involuntarily, for the first time ever—a little bubble of lonely weariness. _Kuroo._

Hinata nodded, getting it. _Go on, you’re done._

He could hear someone—presumably Kenma’s hunter—scaling the tree outside. He bit his lip. _It was nice having you in my head for a while._

 _It’s was nice being here,_ Kenma replied, in the same soft way, like he was lofting the thought lightly upward for Hinata to catch.

Kuroo swung himself into the room and to Hinata’s bedside. “So,” he said, grinning at Hinata. “All set?”

Hinata nodded decisively and sat up. With a moment’s hesitation he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood—swayed—and found his balance, his vision only swimming momentarily. There was no weakness in his legs, no pain in his ankle, not even any pain in his side. He grinned proudly at Kuroo.

Kuroo whistled and clapped, his eyes bright with relief. “Ready?” he asked, and Hinata nodded.

Kuroo reached back to tug Kageyama from his mind and Hinata did the same, his fingers finding the little cat face of Kenma’s plug. _Bye, Kenma._

A little burst of warmth, and then he could swear he felt lips brush his cheek. _Goodbye, Shouyo._

His cheeks heating, he tugged Kenma out of his head and passed him to Kuroo, accepting Kageyama in return. When his plug was slid into place he felt the last of the tension leave his body, Kageyama slipping into the space meant for him with cool, incredible relief.

“I’ll let you two get reacquainted,” Kuroo said. “Your friends are outside when you’re ready.”

Hinata nodded absently, his whole attention on having his AI back for good. _Missed you,_ he said, because he had, and now they could be as embarrassing at each other as they liked, and Kageyama sent him a little grouchy echo. Hinata could feel him all the way through his body, like he was checking Kenma’s work, and he did the same, looking down at himself, rolling his foot on his ankle. He pulled up his shirt to check his side.

There was a scar, starting just under his last rib and curling down into his stomach and back out, like someone had cut out a slice of him and then stuck it back on. He had to push his pants down his hip a little to see where it ended—just below his hipbone, in a kind of blotchy mark that looked a little like an arrowhead. “Geez,” he muttered, running his fingers over the raised flesh.

 _There was a rock stuck in you, there,_ Kageyama said quietly, his attention following Hinata’s fingers, and Hinata’s stomach clenched up hard. _I wanted to pull it out but your hands were too slick with blood, and anyway Kuroo said it’s better that I didn’t because it might’ve made you die faster._

Hinata swallowed at the calm in his voice, the cool blankness. _Kageyama._

He felt his AI struggling to hold back something, and he kind of—reached out for it. At the touch of his mental hand it bloomed outward like a flower—waves of nauseous, trembling fear, a desperation so total that it completely overwhelmed Hinata’s other senses. When he came back to himself he was doubled over on the floor, vomiting up nothing, his mouth sour and his mind aching. Little shivers ran down his spine like aftershocks, and he wrapped his arms around himself hard, trying to push through his own skin to the space inside him where his best friend was curled and apologetic.

 _Sorry,_ Kageyama babbled, little bits of words between the lingering waves of fear and relief. _In Kuroo’s head I couldn’t—let myself feel, I—it was so different from here, I just had to keep it all bottled up and—sorry. Sorry—_

Hinata spat and shook his head. He ran his hands over his face. “It’s okay,” he said aloud, his throat rasping a liftle. “S’okay, I can’t.” He swallowed. “Must be hard to ever express that stuff without your own body.”

Kageyama calmed down a little, curled closer, and Hinata wiped at his eyes and mouth. 

_Yeah,_ his AI said, _you kind of figure out ways, talk yourself down from stuff, but—nothing ever really goes away, you know? I’m—every thought I’ve ever had in here is still in here with me, and every bit of emotion, too, it’s all here, and a bunch of bits and thoughts and emotions of yours, too. I guess that’s—me, right, that’s what I am. All that stuff._

Hinata thought about that. _I guess,_ he said, _but I think you’re probably some other stuff, too. I think you—we, everybody—we’re like the stuff we’ve done and the stuff we think plus the stuff we might do and might think, and then like a body to keep it all in? Only you don’t have that part, but you still have the other part. The future part._

Kageyama hesitated. _Yeah._ A pause. _I think I’m kinda also. What you’ll do?_

Hinata frowned. “I dunno,” he said, because all of this was giving him a headache. “Maybe.” He rolled his neck, spat again, and wandered toward the entrance. “Not for long, though, because what I’m gonna do next is get your body back.” He stepped to the doorway, peering downward, and saw Noya, Tsukkishima, and Kuroo on the ground outside. “Hey!!” He shouted.

Noya and Tsukishima’s heads snapped up, and Noya threw his arms up in victory. “Shouyo! Look at you, you’re beautiful!”

Hinata beamed at him and—with Kageyama’s worried help—swung himself out of the tree to the ground. With a confidence that was mostly real, he jogged over to them. 

Noya immediately wrapped him up in a hug. “Welcome back to the world,” he murmured into Hinata’s hair. “Never ever do that to me again.”

Hinata pulled back to give him a solemn look. “It _was_ to you specifically, Noya-senpai. An elaborate revenge scheme for eating my roasted chestnuts last week.”

Noya pressed a hand to his heart. “I shared!”

Hinata rolled his eyes. “You shared with _Shimizu,_ ” he said pointedly, and looked at Tsukishima.

Tsukishima ran his eyes over his face and then looked away.

Hinata raised his eyebrows. “Tsukishima? Aren’t you happy to see me?”

Tsukishima continued to stare at the forest, his jaw tightening. Hinata was about to press him more, but Noya knocked him with a shoulder. “Leave him be,” he said quietly, his eyes worried. “He’s a little fragile right now.”

Hinata blinked at him. “What? Why?”

Noya shook his head. “Talk to Kageyama about it,” he recommended, “later.”

“Hinata,” Tsukishima said suddenly, turning to look at him, “where were you going?”

“Are,” Hinata corrected, and then corrected himself, “um, am, I _am_ going to Seijou to figure out how to bring Kageyama back.” He froze, remembering that Tsukishima didn’t know, but Kageyama sent him a bubble of reassurance, and everything made a little more sense. No wonder he was fragile, if he’d just found out. He hoped Daichi and Suga-senpai wouldn’t be too mad.

Tsukishima’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Back?” he asked.

Hinata nodded vigorously. “Yeah! You wanna come? Maybe we can put Yamaguchi back in his body too—“

Noya elbowed him hard in the side at the same time that Kageyama snapped, _stop talking, idiot!_

“What?” said Hinata plaintively. 

Tsukishima was watching him, his head a tiny bit cocked to one side. “We can’t,” he said simply. “But I’ll come with you for a while.” He glanced at Noya. “Not all the way. There’s something I want to find.”

Noya nodded, like he understood something Hinata didn’t, and Tsukishima sighed and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Packing,” he said abruptly, and left the clearing.

Noya turned to Hinata, the emotion in his eyes complicated. “Can you really—“ he started, and then stopped. “You really think we can put them back in their bodies?”

Hinata shrugged loosely. “We gotta be able to,” he said, “right? They came out of ‘em okay, and they’re right there, waiting.” He took a little breath, staring upward at the pattern of leaves against light, feeling the press of Kageyama’s mind on his, pushing upward like a seedling against loam, hopeful, hopeful. “Besides,” he said, “I really don’t wanna live without him anymore. Not now I know there’s another choice.”

Noya said nothing, and when Hinata glanced at him he saw his eyes were wet, his mouth pressed tight and trembling, his fists pushed deep into his pockets. Hinata stepped into his space and tipped their foreheads together, wrapping a hand around the back of Noya’s neck. “So you’re coming with me, huh,” he said, not really a question.

Noya’s hands came up to grip his shirt. “Stupid,” he said, “like I’d let you out of my sight.”

Hinata grinned and pulled him into a proper hug again, just holding on, and Noya rocked them back and forth, back and forth, until they both felt in tune again with the rhythm of the world.

+

Kuroo left them at the edge of Nekoma territory. Hinata had ranged ahead, pleased with how light and supple all his limbs felt, but he paused to wait as the tall hunter said goodbye to Noya and Tsukishima. He didn’t feel much need to say goodbye himself, somehow; it was like Kuroo wouldn’t actually be _going_ , because if Hinata needed him Kageyama could always let Kenma know, and that was always true of everyone but somehow it felt more true with Kuroo, like the psychic pathways between them had solidified into something tangible, in an emotional sense if not a physical one.

“Where are you off to?” Noya asked Kuroo curiously.

Kuroo tucked his hands into the belt that held his knives. “Thought I’d pay Daichi a visit, actually,” he said. “I’m sure he’s got reasons for his secrecy, but after what happened to him—“ he jerked his head at Hinata, “I think it’s about time we knew them.”

Noya and Tsukishima both nodded. “We’ll be back to meet you there soon, then,” Noya said, and glanced at Tsukishima. “Right?”

Tsukishima nodded slowly. “I think so,” he said.

Kuroo gave him a long look. “Right,” he said, and then gave Hinata a little wave and Noya a salute. “See you soon, then.” He raised an eyebrow at Tsukishima. “And you, but only maybe.” He smirked. “Or maybe I’ll make a point of seeing you sooner.”

Tsukishima lifted his lips at him in a snarl, and Kuroo chuckled at him. A pause like the moment before a drumbeat, and then he was moving, so swift he was nearly flying, away into the trees.

Hinata blinked after him. _Kenma doesn’t mind him flirting like that,_ he said, half a question, to Kageyama. 

_They’re not,_ Kageyama started, and then stopped. _If you could see the way he thinks about Kenma I think you’d get it. They’re not like us._

 _I think I do get it,_ Hinata said slowly, _from seeing how Kenma thinks about him._ He grinned to himself. _So you’d mind if I flirted, huh?_

 _No,_ Kageyama snapped, _and it’s not like anyone would be interested in you anyway,_ but he was radiating a kind of disgruntled embarrassment that meant _yes_ and set Hinata’s heart racing embarrassingly fast.

 _Hurtful,_ Hinata shot back, but there was a joyful, echoing kind of freedom in knowing Kageyama could feel the beat of his heart, knew what it meant.

From the Nekoma border Tsukishima—for reasons he wouldn’t explain—insisted they head west before turning north. He navigated them very precisely to a single spot on the forest floor and then turned ninety degrees, leading them back into the pine forest Hinata loved.

Had. Had loved.

The rich pine scent now raised the hairs on the back of his neck and made his stomach turn. Fear prickled across his shoulders, his back, down his arms. He kept glancing back at nothing. Kageyama tried to reassure him, but it didn’t seem to work—no matter how many times he told himself, or Kageyama told him, or they told each other that everything was fine, the feeling of being watched never went away. 

They echoed comfort back and forth between them for nearly an hour of northward travel before Noya jogged up beside him. “You okay?” he asked. “You’re running like a scared rabbit, you’re gonna exhaust yourself.”

Hinata made himself slow down. “I keep, um.” He swallowed. “It happened near here, or. A place like this, and I keep thinking there’s more of them.”

Noya stopped, so Hinata stopped too, and Tsukishima grudgingly halted, ahead of them. “What?” he asked.

“We’re gonna take a different route,” Noya called, his eyes still on Hinata’s face. “You can find your camp or whatever, we’ll skirt around this part and go up to Seijou.”

Tsukishima frowned. “What?” he asked. “But you’re headed directly north, this is the fastest way—“

“Tsukishima,” Noya said, turning to him. “You know that shit you said about trauma? Yamaguchi’s not the only one who’s got some.”

For what felt like the first time since Hinata woke up, Tsukishima actually looked at his face, his eyes appraising. Hinata grimaced between him and Noya. “It’s not that bad,” he protested. “I can take it—“

“No,” Tsukishima said, cutting him off. “Nishinoya’s right. Have Kageyama find a way around.” He turned away like it was settled, heading back on their intended course.

“Hang on,” Hinata said, uneasy. “Should we be splitting up? If there are more of them—“

Noya bit his lip. “He’s got a point,” he said to Tsukishima. “We never saw anything in Nekoma but that doesn’t mean—“

Tsukishima shook his head. “We can’t stop trusting ourselves,” he said quietly. “We don’t have the resources to always travel in packs. You need to go to Aobajousai to get some answers, and I—“ he paused, staring at the forest floor. “I have answers of my own to find.”

Noya’s eyes went distant, and Hinatra fidgeted while he talked to Asahi. _Is there a quick way where we don’t have to be in this part of the Wood?_ he asked Kageyama.

There was a flicker on the edges of his mind as Kageyama consulted his maps and coordinates. _We’re pretty close to that lake Daichi and Suga were talking about,_ he said. _If we detour there, catch the geese–they’ll be older, tougher, but they’ll do to make up for the food we lost by delaying—we can cut northwest from there and be back on track without dealing with these stupid trees. We’d still make it by tomorrow at midday._

“Okay,” said Noya, seeming to come to the same conclusion. “We head to the lake?”

Hinata nodded, and Kageyama showed him the right direction to go. He looked at Tsukishima. “I’d ask you what you were doing, but you wouldn’t tell me, right?”

Tsukishima shrugged fluidly. “Seems only fair I keep my silence like you kept yours.” He hesitated. “If it turns out to be something you need to know…”

Hinata smiled at him. “I know,” he said. “You’re stubborn, but you wouldn’t let it put us in danger.” He crossed the distance between them, reaching out to take Tsukishima’s hand in both of us. “I don’t know what’s happening in your head,” he said seriously, “but don’t let it put _you_ in danger either, okay?”

Tsukishima didn’t pull away, but he didn’t answer, either, just staring down at Hinata, silent.

Hinata squeezed his hand and let go. “Be careful,” he said, and went to rejoin Noya.

 _I was right about Yamaguchi,_ Kageyama said as they settled back into their loping stride. _The thing that hurt you, he’s seen them before, and they did something to him—to his body, that they tried to do to you, but on him it worked._ That little hollow feeling that Hinata had begun to associate with swallowing. _Tsukishima said he was dead, but I think it’s more complicated than that._

 _Oh,_ said Hinata, suddenly tasting tears. No wonder Tsukishima had been so hollow-eyed and silent. _Oh my god._

 _Yeah,_ said Kageyama quietly. _So. There was no point to him coming with us, because._

 _Yeah,_ said Hinata. He bit his lip. _Can you tell Yamaguchi I’m sorry? To pass on to Tsukishima but also just. To him._

He expected Kageyama to tell him it was pointless, but his AI just gave him a quiet of course and then lapsed into a kind of present, attentive silence.

They jogged until dark. When the underbrush started to thicken, the pines joined by gnarled, twisting deciduous trees, Hinata felt himself relax, deeply glad to be leaving the wide, too-open avenues behind them.

The usual dusk-sounds seemed to return without their sinister edge, and—slowly, slowly, surrounded by the whispers of birds settling into nests, the rustle of small creatures foraging—Hinata became hunter again, not prey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, sooo you might have noticed that in the last chapter & this one, a couple weird timeline things are happening! The last chapter started slightly before the end of the one before it, enough that Noya had time to talk to Asahi before Hinata got jumped by the Thing, and this chapter starts slightly before the end of THAT one, enough that we see Tsukki & Noya stressin' about Hinata before he wakes up. That's gonna continue! It's a fun timeline thing that I'm playing with in order to give you a fuller picture of this pretty complicated world I'm attempting to build. It means you might see the same scene a couple times (like here with Hinata waking up and seeing Noya); those of you who have read my KnB fics know how much I love that, and I hope you do too. It also means I can do fun things like have Hinata & Kageyama's scene from last chapter where they "meet" (externally) happen simultaneously with Noya & Asahi's "meeting" (internally) without disrupting the flow of either scene by intercutting them.
> 
> There are also new viewpoints all the time—that will also continue, but not forever; I have one more character whose head you will definitely be in soon, but as of right now that's it.
> 
> Anyway. This chapter took me ages to write, and a lot happens—let me know what you think!
> 
> Thanks for reading & I love you!


	5. Chapter 5

Tsukishima walked north.

Even with Hinata having split off hours ago, his unease remained, sitting low to the ground like a fog between the long avenues of pines. The air was sharp with sap and rot, all the scents of the forest somehow too earthy, tying Tsukishima’s every breath into the cycle of death that was nature itself—the body’s slow decay into soil. Tsukishima firmed his shoulders and kept going.

Yamaguchi had set a marker at the exact center of the Wood, with yards and feet counting steadily down in the corner of Tsukishima’s eye as he walked. But as he got closer he found himself ignoring it, paying more attention to the growing, gnawing dread at the back of his mind, the dread he felt Yamaguchi try–and fail, repeatedly–to suppress.

50 yards from the center of the Wood, he stopped.

There was a building to his left.

It was hard to tell it was a building—the accelerated growth of plants and animals in the Wood meant that structures abandoned turned to ruins very quickly, and most of what it was was a mass of overgrown stone, but it was a constructed mass, the stones fitting together by design. There was a small tree winding its way upwards from one of the sides, its roots shoved haphazard between the stones of what was once a wall. Tsukishima walked around it, and saw that out of the opposite side stretched a half caved-in archway, leading toward the center of the Wood.

 _Yamaguchi,_ he said, and Yamaguchi sent him a shivering acknowledgment. _Are you sure you can do this?_

Yamaguchi hesitated. _You want to know the truth,_ he said, not question but statement.

_Yes._

Yamaguchi paused again. I never want anyone to go through what I did. There was a feeling of expansion, like he’d been crunching himself down small and now he was uncurling, stretching muscles, popping joints. Tsukishima felt a sense of power—tentative power, not quite confident yet, but power nonetheless—radiate from the back of his mind to sit behind his eyes. It will be dangerous, Yamaguchi warned.

 _I’m no coward,_ Tsukishima countered, but with no heat.

 _I know,_ said Yamaguchi, quiet and fond. _I know, Tsukki._

Tsukishima stepped through the archway, and then Yamaguchi was in front of him.

He wasn’t—real. Tsukishima had to immediately and firmly tell himself that, but once he had it became obvious. He wavered like the air over a too-hot road. His colors were off—too pale, too thin, and inconsistent—like he was painted not with dye but with the watery blue-grey-red of the river stones that Nishinoya and Hinata used to grind up to draw on each others’ faces, never enough to obscure their sunburns but just enough to give a kind of wild, inhuman caste to their features. He wasn’t even sure how he knew it was Yamaguchi at all, except that Yamaguchi was probably telling him, somewhere in the back of his brain.

He did have freckles. His face was elfin and open and they were scattered across his cheekbones like tiny stars, and Tsukishima was stepping forward, his arm outstretched to touch them before he knew he was moving at all.

Yamaguchi ducked out of his way, his lips curling in something rueful and sad. _“Sorry,”_ he said, and though his lips were moving it echoed inside Tsukishima’s head instead of in the air between them. _“I think it’s been too long since I was alive, if you touch me I’ll lose my hold on it.”_

“Oh,” said Tsukishima, and dropped his arm, and then, _Oh._

“ _Sorry,”_ said Yamaguchi again, and they both—lingered there for a second too long, two boys beneath a ruined archway, staring at each other, trying to feel the sun.

 _“Tsukki,”_ Yamaguchi said, and then he said, _“I—follow me.”_

He turned. Tsukishima stared at the slim line of his back, the river-line of his spine where it rose in eddies at the conjunction of his shoulders and disappeared downward into what might have been clothing and what might have been mist. He could still feel his guidance, if he tried hard enough to pay attention to the inside of his head, but it was so, so much easier to let his tired mind relax, let himself be pulled through an increasingly confusing landscape by that slim form, by that voice murmuring things he didn’t quite catch but didn’t need to, comforts and questions and scraps of thought. the walls between them lapsed in favor of the weird elastic stretch of physical space.

He was aware of more buildings, more closely gathered, though he understood why they’d never really been explored. For one thing, the air here was dead silent—no birds, no small rustlings of underbrush creatures, not even the tiny, almost-imperceptible chewings and squirmings of insects. The hunters, as far as Tsukishima knew, had always moved with the flock or herd their AI had chosen for them, and if the aversion he’d sensed from Yamaguchi were standard for the other AI—

 _“It is,”_ Yamaguchi said, in his musical not-voice, pausing on what might have once been a step and now looked more like a ripple of water over stone, frozen in time and deep mossy green. _“Though I think that’s my fault, and I think mine is. Worse.”_

“Of course it is,” Tsukishima said, his own voice breaking the silence so thoroughly that it made him twitch. “You—“

 _Died here,_ said that walls around him, though he’d stopped himself in time.

 _“Yes,”_ said Yamaguchi, _“I died here.”_

He stepped lightly off his ripple of plant and stone, looking around, and Tsukishima—perhaps by choice, perhaps at his direction—looked, too.

They were in a round space, set a little lower than the forest floor—a lowering not made by the uprooting of trees or the swift carving of water but by human hands, a perfectly circular space dug wide. More steps like ripples spread outward and upward, leading to a number of archways, one of which Tsukishima had just passed through, following his AI.

Climbing vines had taken over half of them, making them almost impenetrable but decorating them with tiny pink and white flowers, set against the red-brown stone like speckles on a fawn. The ground itself was rocky and mossy, grey and green and overgrown, but all of that meant nothing—there could have been humans here six months ago, or none for twenty years.

If it weren’t for the bitter fear in the back of Tsukishima’s throat and the everpresent, creeping silence, it would have been quite beautiful.

Tsukishima took a step forward, and the bare skin of his foot hit something slick, solid, and cold.

He froze, drew his foot back, and looked down.

In the exact center of the circular construction, there were no stones, and the moss was different—drier, thinner; when Tsukishima knelt to tug at it it crumbled in his hands. He pushed it out of the way, revealing a metal rectangle, maybe four feet by three. It looked like the metal doors that had once closed the tunnels in Karasuno off from the camp itself, before they had all rusted into their final positions, mostly half-closed or open too-wide the mouths of hungry fish, only this one was set horizontally into the stone floor, and rusted entirely closed, instead.

Tsukishima ran his fingertips along its edges with one hand, his other going to his knife. If there was no handle, and it seemed there wasn’t, he might be able to pry—

“You won’t be able to open it,” Yamaguchi said, and Tsukishima looked up at him.

He’d paused at the side of the circle, and there was something in his stance that made Tsukishima pause, too, his fingers freezing in place at the cool edge of the trap door. Some—physical manifestation of the horror at the back of his mind, some poise in the set of his shoulders, newly directed, like if Tsukishima—not this place, not some unknown creature, but if _Tsukishima_ made the wrong move, Yamaguchi would flee.

Yamaguchi was _scared_ of him. Of what he might do, here.

He stood up, suddenly very aware of his own stupid gangling tallness, of the way he was always caught by the sweep of the wind.

 _I’m sorry,_ he said, into the comfort of his own mind, left it sitting there, trying to pull Yamaguchi back in. _Yama. I’m sorry._

Yamaguchi shook his head as if to say _don’t mind, don’t mind_ , but his eyes were lingering on the trap door and the distance between them still felt too real.

 _I’ll,_ said Tsukishima, and swallowed. _I’ll leave it—_

Yamaguchi raised his eyes, and then he smiled, and the warmth of him rushed back all at once, overwhelming and so fond that Tsukishima had to take a tiny breath in shock. _“No,”_ Yamaguchi said softly. _“No, we’ve come this far.”_

He approached the trap door slowly, then paced around it, rolling his ghostly shoulders, the power he’d pulled to himself when he’d first manifested physically returning. From shivering rabbit he turned calculating wolf, his eyes getting sharp and bright and Tsukishima’s own vision narrowing. _“You won’t be able to open it,”_ he said again, “but I think—if you’re willing to let me try something, I think there might be another way for you to see what’s down there.”

Tsukishima frowned at him. _Try something?_ he asked. _Try what?_

Yamaguchi looked around, and then flickered, not bothering to climb the steps so much as appear on top of them. He beckoned, and then gestured to the base of one of the archways, one of the ones so overgrown with vines and what looked like a small rose bush, not yet in bloom, that it was like there was never a passage there at all. 

_“Sit,”_ said Yamaguchi, and Tsukishima obeyed, his back against the stone. He settled his legs comfortably, instinctively knowing Yamaguchi meant him to be there for a while, and then looked up at his AI.

From here, Yamaguchi was candlelight through smoke, the sun behind him picking him out thin and rainbowed and surreal, a shifting, gorgeous thing ready to be blown away by the slightest breeze. He stepped closer—close enough to touch—and Tsukihima clenched his hands against his knees. 

_“Do you trust me?”_ Yamaguchi asked, leaning down over him, and Tsukishima’s yes was lost in the swift cool touch of fingertips on his forehead. 

The air left his lungs—and was immediately replaced with a rending, howling pain, starting low in his stomach and tearing upward through him, darkness in its wake.

+

They slept, curled together, under the low-hanging branches of an apple tree heavy with fruit. Hinata awoke with Noya’s hair in his mouth and Kageyama in his head, and found himself wishing—suddenly and intensely—that the two were switched.

He spent the morning not quite letting himself actually think about that— Kageyama sleeping, his face pressed to Hinata’s chest; Kageyama waking up in his arms, his dark dark eyes soft with sleep; Kageyama waking him up with his hands and his mouth—and he could feel Kageyama not letting himself really think about it either, until they were both exhausted with the effort of not giving in to daydream, of not getting lost between their minds.

 _Ugh,_ Kageyama said, heartfelt. _Can we like. Talk about something, instead of just. Feeling?_

 _Sure,_ Hinata said, “but maybe aloud? Inside my head I’m still all.” He laughed a little. “Muddled.”

 _Yeah, I know,_ said Kageyama grumpily, _I’m in here, dumbass._

“So,” said Hinata. Noya was above them, scouting through the treetops to see if he could tell how close they were to the lake’s edge. He was far enough away that Hinata didn’t fear for his privacy, and it did feel better to speak aloud, like he was breathing in air again and not just pure, frustrated longing. “What do we talk about?”

 _How should I know?_ Kageyama complained.

“It was your idea!” Hinata retorted, indignant. “I figured you might have something to say–“

 _Why would I say anything when you just know it all anyway?_ Kageyama asked.

Hinata blinked. “I know it all? You mean, you don’t have any walls anymore?”

Kageyama sounded puzzled. _Why would I? You took down yours._

“You mean the only reason you had walls up was because I did?” Hinata demanded, half laughing. “That’s the most contrary thing I’ve ever heard—“

 _Shut up, that’s not what I meant,_ Kageyama said. _I just mean, when you took down yours I thought I’d. Y’know. I thought honesty was. The thing we were doing._

“So what you’re saying,” Hinata said slowly, “is that I can ask you whatever I want and you’ll tell me the truth.” He narrowed his eyes and leapt casually over a hedge. “In fact you’ll _have_ to tell me, because your reaction will be right there in my brain for me to see!”

 _No,_ said Kageyama quickly, _that is not what I’m saying._

“It is!” Hinata insisted. “It totally is. You said honesty!”

 _Shut up,_ said Kageyama. _Shh. Go away._

Hinata bit his lip, and felt Kageyama’s attention drift to where he’d bitten, absent and a little longing. He cleared his throat. “I get a question, you get a question?” he suggested.

Kageyama hesitated. _Sure,_ he said. _Only. You may as well just ask me questions, I already know everything about you._

Hinata squinted at the sky. “Who is he?” he asked. “Oi-ka-wa-too-ru.” He said it disjointed, singsong, trying to pull the meaning out from the characters, but also because he knew it was a touchy subject and maybe being silly about it would make Kageyama more comfortable.

 _You know I can see all the reasons you do dumb stuff, right?_ Kageyama asked.

Hinata blushed, but shot back, “You know I can see that you’re evading the question, right?”

A quick flash of Kageyama’s face across his mind—eyebrows twitched together, tongue out—and he laughed, and waited.

 _He’s,_ Kageyama started. _He was my first hunter. When I first got turned AI, I was paired up with him._

“Oh,” said Hinata, suddenly and ridiculously jealous. “Do you miss him?”

 _No!_ said Kageyama, quick and certain. _It was totally different than you. We. Didn’t really get along._ An uncomfortable sort of shift. _He’s an amazingly talented hunter, but our sync was really bad a lot of the time._

“Oh,” said Hinata, relieved. “Good.”

 _Shut up,_ said Kageyama, _it’s not, I thought I was really bad at this, I thought—I thought I was a failure, that the experiment was—_

“Hey!” said Hinata, loud enough that Noya glanced back at him, but moved on when Hinata shook his head at him apologetically. “Don’t you dare say that, you’re the best AI in the Wood, I don’t care what Bokuto-san says.”

Kageyama sent him a wave of embarrassment. _Thanks._

“Yeah,” said Hinata, just as embarrassed. “Well. You’re that good in _my_ head, anyway.”

Kageyama sent him an emotion he had no words for, like an exasperated caress. _Dumbass._

“What about,” said Hinata, his cheeks hot, and then he grinned, mischievous. “When was the first time you realized you had feelings for me?”

Kageyama made one of those noise-feelings that Hinata would love to know what looked like, what his face would be doing. He imagined it a couple ways—Kageyama bright red, his eyes wide, or maybe his mouth turned downward in disapproval and his brows drawn together, or maybe he’d be openmouthed and gaping like a fish. Hinata laughed.

 _Stop that,_ Kageyama snapped, _stop thinking about me looking dumb—_

“Not dumb,” Hinata said, “cute. Well, and dumb. Dumb and cute.” He stretched upward, his whole mind feeling light. “You didn’t answer my question.”

 _Stop,_ said Kageyama, entirely differently. _Hinata. Stop moving._

Hinata froze. Above him, he was aware of Noya doing the same.

 _Three,_ said Kageyama, with a kind of terrified calm. _There are three of them._

 _Up?_ Hinata asked, and Kageyama had already chosen him a tree. He was up it in seconds, exchanging a glance with Noya opposite him. Without being asked, Kageyama showed him where the creatures were—ahead and to the right, mostly not moving, just swaying unnaturally in place like stalks of wheat moved by individual winds.

 _What do we do?_ he asked Kageyama. _Do we go around, or—_

 _Hold on,_ Kageyama said, and then went silent for a minute, and then another voice—deep and anxious—said, _Hello?_

Hinata blinked. _Who,_ he started, and then, _Asahi?_

 _Hey,_ said Asahi, embarrassed. He sounded like—the deep creak of trees at night, shifting more comfortably into their roots.

 _Good,_ said Kageyama, sounding satisfied with himself. _I thought so. Asahi, you wanna try the next bit?_

There was a feel like a weird heat prickling above Hinata’s temples, and then Noya said, way too loudly, _HINATA? HELLO?_

 _Ow,_ said Hinata, _fuckin’—shh, senpai._

 _Sorry,_ Noya said at a much more reasonably volume, and his mind-voice wavered with laughter. He was so _bright,_ bright and sharp and sparking. His voice made Hinata itch. _Didn’t think about how distance isn’t actually real._

 _This is awesome,_ Hinata said, _how come we haven’t been doing this the whole time?_

 _We didn’t know how,_ Asahi said apologetically, _not until Kageyama kinda broke into everyone’s head at once when you were, you know._

 _Dying,_ Noya filled in helpfully, possibly unintentionally.

Hinata laughed, careful to keep it silent puffs of breath. Okay, he said, trying to adjust to the idea that he wasn’t just talking to Kageyama. _So what’s our plan?_

 _We can take ‘em, right?_ Noya asked. _The other one got a drop on you, and you were alone. With the element of surprise—_

 _Not a good idea,_ Asahi said immediately. _That thing barely touched Hinata and you saw what happened. We can’t risk it. Better to find a silent way around them and just continue on, very alert._

 _I agree,_ said Kageyama quietly, _except—_

He stopped, and when Hinata prompted him, _except?_ he could suddenly feel a new uneasiness from his AI.

 _I can’t reach Yamaguchi,_ Kageyama said quietly. _I could yesterday, and they shouldn’t be out of range, but now—it’s like hitting a glass wall. They must be doing something weird, and if we leave these three alive and they continue on their present course—_

 _They don’t have a present course,_ Noya objected, _they’re just—standing._

 _Facing us,_ Hinata pointed out, _so, like. Facing him. If whatever he’s doing is keeping Yamaguchi so busy—_

 _Tsukishima’s half blind without his AI,_ Asahi said softly, _and that’s if he’s awake and aware while they do whatever they’re doing._

 _Okay,_ said Hinata, _then we take them down without letting them touch us._ He took a steadying breath. Kageyama wasn’t highlighting the creatures anymore, but he could swear he could feel them, his awareness of them sitting clammy on his skin like pond scum. His ankle twinged. 

_Hinata,_ Noya said, sounding worried, _are you sure you’re up to this at all?_

 _Yeah,_ said Hinata, with a confidence he didn’t feel, and he was pretty sure they could all feel that he didn’t feel it. _I’m fine, I just gotta throw my knives at them, right? It’s just target practice. Can’t miss._

 _Okay,_ said Asahi, slowly, _but, um, what if you do?_

Kageyama was thinking, so Hinata let him do it, trying not to take offense at Asahi. He was just thinking it through, he knew. It wasn’t personal.

 _Okay,_ said Kageyama. _We work it like the deer. You remember?_

 _Duh,_ Hinata shot back, and Kageyama sent just him—god, hopefully just him—a tiny little warm something that made his blood fizz. To Noya and Asahi, he said, _Hinata hits the closest one with his knife. He won’t miss. They’re not moving, so we have some time to prepare. Nishinoya, do you carry rope?_

Noya made a dismissive noise that felt like the ear-pop of atmosphere change. _What kind of hunter doesn’t carry rope?_

 _Right,_ said Kageyama, _take Hinata’s, too,_ and with a combination of words, little prompts to Hinata’s muscles, and nonverbal weird AI instructions to Asahi, he brought them close to the edge of the clearing.

The creatures stood like shadows peeled up from the ground, silhouetted against the mirror brightness of the lake. Hinata was aware of Noya to his left, swarming silently down the trunk of a tree like a slider, his rope curled at his hip. As Hinata watched, he made his first knot at the intersection of a low branch, then shimmied back up again, spooling the rope out behind him. He leapt weightlessly from a higher branch to the neighboring tree and made a second knot at the base of a parallel branch, moving quick, efficient, and graceful.

Hinata felt his own pride in his friend, and—faint—a second sense, deeper and more wondering. He made sure Kageyama was keeping watch on the movements of the creatures and started a kind of mental balancing act, reaching out to that new awareness that was Asahi without touching the entangled concentrated brightness of Noya’s mind. _He’s amazing, huh?_

Asahi sent him a startled spark and then, shaded soft with embarrassment and tenderness, _yeah, he is._

 _He’s done,_ Kageyama said, unobtrusive, and Hinata pulled back into his own mind. Noya—moving with a silence Hinata would never have credited him with if he hadn’t seen it so often on the hunt—had created a sort of web between the trees at the back of the creatures, between them and the lake, so that now the things were bracketed between him and his web and Hinata and his knives.

 _The one on the right, first,_ Kageyama said, and Hinata was going to snap at him that he didn’t have to actually say anything until he felt the reassurance in it. This wasn’t Kageyama talking down to it, it was a mental hand squeeze with words attached, a little, _this is us, not just you._

Hinata took a breath. _Ready, guys?_

Simultaneous assent from Asahi and Noya was like a very small thunderclap right over head—lightning and rolling noise at once. It—with Kageyama’s fierce, protective flame at his back—made him feel good and powerful and right.

His first knife took the one on the right in the eye. His second, scant seconds later, hit the one in the middle as it swung around to stare at its shrieking companion, thudding into the soft spot just behind and below the ear—the exact place, Hinata realized with a sick jolt, where Kageyama’s plug sat in his head. The place he would always press sloppy kisses when Natsu got too interested in hunter stuff. Filled with nerves, the cooler part of his brain said. Close to the brain.

The Wood was filled with inhuman screaming. The first creature clawed at its eye, its burn-poison fingers unable to get purchase on the small handle of Hinata’s knife. It smashed a shoulder into a tree, leaving a smear of blood and ash, stumbled, stumbled, stumbled. The second folded in on itself with a gurgling kind of wail, almost sad.

The third creature swayed in place a moment, and then swung round and ran—sideways. Away from Noya, and away from his web. With an instinct not at all animal, it darted past its dying companions and through the trees to the right.

 _Fuck!_ Noya snapped, pin-bright, already up and racing after it.

 _Noya,_ Hinata said, panicked, _maybe don’t—_

_No,_ Asahi said, _I think better to take them all down rather than leave this one scrambling through the trees—_

Kageyama had a tiny moment of indecision, and then the thing cut left again, ducking out through the last of the trees onto the shore of the lake, and his indecision turned to fear. _Don’t let it touch the water!_ he snapped. _That lake feeds the entire Aobajousai quadrant, if that thing taints it—_

Hinata sped up, scrambling for his last knife. Kageyama highlighted not only the creature but Noya as well, getting as high as he could in the trees, his fingers working quick with his rope, forming a lasso in a flash and swinging it around his head. Hinata reached the same tree, but lower down, and saw immediately that the rope Noya had left was not enough—the thing was already beyond his reach entirely, stumbling toward the water’s edge. He fingered his knife. If he hit it now, it would probably fall forward, tainting the water even more if it were bleeding—

There was a _fwip_ of taught sinew, a shuddering scream, and the thing fell backwards onto the rocks, an arrow in its throat.

Hinata blinked, felt Noya’s total surprise as well, and then Kageyama said, in a voice half amazement and half disapproval, _there._

From the trees around the edge of the lake stepped a figure, dappled with sunlight, his longbow in his hands. He was tall, with broad shoulders and a slim waist, and Kageyama said, _Oikawa-san_ like he was pronouncing a sentence of doom.

Hinata—hesitant—swung himself down from his tree, and watched as Oikawa made his way around the edge of the lake toward them.

After a few paces he made some kind of gesture with his hand and a second figure slid out of the woods to join him, staying a few paces behind. They approached slowly, like they weren’t sure what to make of Hinata and Noya, who leapt down to stand at his side. Hinata was glad of it, as it let him study the man he’d come to find in peace.

Oikawa Tooru had a fine-boned, strong-jawed kind of face. He was soft-haired, lean, and smirking, pretty without losing anything of the quintessential masculinity in his bearing, and his watchful brown eyes put Hinata in mind of a snake, or an alligator lurking just below the water’s surface.

The boy at his side was shorter, his black hair tousled and his face set in a scowl, and he looked—odd. Or. Not even looked odd so much as moved odd, like he was used to being heavier. His skin, too, sat on him like he had once had more muscle than he did now. It reminded Hinata a bit of the way Asahi had looked, somehow.

“Um,” Hinata said, as soon as they were close enough, “Hi, I’m—Hinata Shouyo, from Karasuno, and this is Noya—Nishinoya.”

“Oh,” said Oikawa, but he didn’t sound like he was responding, really.. He stepped up to Hinata, peering close at his face—no; there was something. Weird, distant and piercing at once, about his gaze. He was staring at Hinata, straight into his eyes; he was smiling bright; but he wasn’t looking at _Hinata_ at all.

Kageyama, in an unthinkingly, overwhelmingly human moment, made a mental noise like _geh._

The edge of Oikawa’s smile curled further upward, as if he’d found what he was looking for. “Hello, Tobio-chan,” he said.

Hinata frowned. It felt weird, hearing Kageyama’s first name in this guy’s voice. That name was a privilege he was given, and he didn’t like hearing it mocked, even though. Maybe he’d done that himself a little when he first heard it but still it wasn’t fair—

Oikawa stepped back a little to look at him. “Aw, don’t make that face, shrimpy,” he said, and ruffled Hinata’s hair. “It’s a term of affection, I promise.”

 _You could have a knife in his gut in about three seconds,_ Kageyama suggested helpfully. 

_Kageyama!_ Asahi chided, his shock going through Hinata like cold water. _Don’t joke about that, there’s too few of us left._

 _It was just a joke,_ Noya said, though he sounded uneasy. _Hinata, why are you looking for this guy?_

 _Oh yeah,_ said Hinata, and then, “Um! Oikawa-san!”

Oikawa was half turned away from him, looking toward the creature at the edge of the lake. He turned back, eyebrows raised. “Yes?”

Hinata took a breath. “Dachi-senpai sent me,” he said. “I—I’m supposed to ask you. About putting AI back in their bodies.”

Oikawa’s expression—flickered. It was the only way Hinata could think to describe it. It didn’t change at all from its mild surprise and sardonic curiosity, but on the fold between one second and the next it dropped away into something else and then was entirely, perfectly restored again.

“Why would Daichi send him here for that?” the other boy asked, showing an interest in them for the first time. “We don’t know anything about that, right Oikawa?”

OIkawa looked at Hinata for another moment, expression still unchanging, and then he said, “Iwa-chan, could you take Shrimpy’s shrimpier friend back to camp and have Matsu and Makki help you make a stretcher for—“ he flickered his fingers at the creature like he was trying to rid them of sticky sap. “That thing. Please?”

‘Iwa-chan’—although he was far too muscled and scowly for Hinata to imagine ever calling him —chan—frowned at Oikawa. “What? Why?”

“Please?” Oikawa said, gesturing him closer.

When Iwa-chan— _Iwaizumi,_ Kageyama informed him—approached, Oikawa did a little ducking-head motion to catch his eyes and hold them. “It’s not about you,” he said, quiet. “I’ll fill you in when you’re back. It’s him, yeah?” he nodded at Noya.

“Hey,” Hinata said, frowning, “whatever you have to say to me you should say to Noya—“

Oikawa cast him a weird, desperate look at the same time that Kageyama said, _Hinata, he’s lying._

Hinata blinked. _He’s what?_

 _He’s lying,_ Kageyama said. _I don’t know why, but he’s lying to Iwaizumi._ He sounded completely baffled by it—little threads not only of _what_ but of _wrong,_ like something about Kageyama’s picture of the world was shaken by Oikawa’s deception.

“I think it makes sense,” Noya chimed in, presumably at Asahi’s prompting. “We want to get that thing away from the water as fast as possible, and we learned the hard way not to touch them with our hands.”

“Oh?” said Oikawa, and looked at Iwaizumi. “Sounds like you two have a lot to talk about on the way. I want a full report when I get back.”

“Who cares what you want? I’m not your fucking lieutenant,” Iwaizumi grumbled, “and you’re not my fucking captain, we’re not in the military.”

Oikawa wrinkled his nose. “I just like the way it sounds,” he said, flippant. “Captain Oikawa.”

“But who says you would even _be_ the captain?” Iwaizumi pointed out, with the air of someone who has already had this argument a thousand times and knows they’re going to lose, but is far too stubborn to not lose wholeheartedly again anyway. “If we’re going by competence it should really be captain Iwaizumi—“

 _Do you think they’re like this all the time?_ Asahi asked with fascination. _How do they ever get any hunting done?_

Oikawa gasped, his voice filled with offense that Hinata couldn’t even tell whether or not was fake. “Iwa-chan! Did you not see that beautiful shot I just made? Into the monster’s throat, from across the lake, and it let me make a dramatic entrance—“

“Shut up,” Iwaizumi snapped, “god, Oikawa, I thought you wanted this done fast—“

He cut himself off.

 _Uh oh,_ said Noya, _there it is. Defeat._

 _Huh?_ said Hinata, but Noya just sent him a kind of mental headshake and directed his attention back to Oikawa, who was smirking, slow and self-assured. “Oh,” he said, “so you _do_ care about what I want?”

Iwaizumi’s jaw tightened, Oikawa’s mouth curled, and there was a silence so tense it almost creaked. 

“Fine,” Iwaizumi finally snapped. “You, what’s your name, Nishinoya, with me.”

He gave Oikawa a last lingering suspicious look and then loped off, seeming to expect Noya to just fall in with his pace, which—after a surprised moment—he did, jogging to catch up with him. 

As soon as they were lost in the trees OIkawa seized Hinata by the wrist and pulled him into the woods at a slightly different angle, his grip like iron. 

“Hey,” Hinata protested, trying to twist free, “watch it—“

Oikawa spun to look at him. “You can fill your friend in later,” he said, low and urgent, “but not a word of what we talk about reaches Iwa-chan, okay?”

Kageyama felt smug. _Told you._

Hinata made a face at Oikawa. “Fine, whatever, just stop dragging me around, okay?”

Oikawa let him go, and Hinata followed him through the Wood a ways. _Your former hunter’s kind of a dick,_ he murmured to Kageyama.

 _He’s—complicated,_ Kageyama responded, in a tone that was much more ‘I know, right?’ than it was denial. _He’s the one who called me King to begin with._

 _Ew_ , said Hinata succinctly, and Kageyama sent him a tiny fond flicker than made his heart swell in his chest.

Oikawa shoved him in front of him and behind a tree. He gestured for Hinata to scramble up it, and Hinata saw there were man-made handholds and steps like shelf-mushrooms to make the wide, branchless trunk more accessible. He pulled himself up easily, Oikawa on his heels.

Oikawa must like living on the edge of the lake, or maybe he wanted have a place close to the edge of Aobajousai like a kind of watchtower. This den home was much more what he expected from somewhere a hunter lived than Kenma and Kuroo’s, although there were lots of keepsakes on the walls—a set of antlers, an extra bow, a necklace hung with weird little spiral shells. But Oikawa didn’t stop here, pushed Hinata ahead of him up another set of carved steps until they emerged in the crook of two branches above the room, wide enough for two people used to heights and to moving with the wind to settle comfortably. 

Hinata wished Noya could be here to see this; the tree was tall, and the thick underbrush in Aobajosai meant that the whole world below them was green, green, layer of green upon green under a slate-grey sky, faded from the sunny blue of earlier in the morning.

“Oh?” said Oikawa from behind him, and Hinata felt fingers behind his ear, tracing over the cap to his port. He spun automatically to knock Oikawa away, but by the time he got there Oikawa had already drawn his hand back, was watching him, amused. “You changed my design.”

Hinata flushed. “Yeah,” he said sullenly. He’d done it the first time Kageyama went in for updates, using the time between the moment he got the plug back and when the AI actually returned to carve away at the plastic with his eating knife, changing the sharp-pointed crown on the end into a crude, spiky sun. “He didn’t like the name,” he said, defensive. “I guessed he didn’t like the symbol, either.”

Kageyama said, _Thank you,_ in a startled tone, and Hinata realized he could never actually see the end of the plug—he never actually knew what Hinata had done. 

He sent him an embarrassed, _duh,_ and felt Kageyama squirm. He coughed a little, watching Oikawa arrange himself almost artfully against the branches opposite him. “Why don’t you want Iwaizumi to know?”

Oikawa gave him a flat look. “You’ve stumbled into a very carefully arranged web of lies,” he said, “and I’m not gonna let some shrimpy kid with my former AI in his head tear it apart.”

Hinata made a face at him. “You’re like two years older than me at _most,_ and you didn’t answer the question.”

OIkawa raised a shoulder in a kind of half-shrug, turning to stare out over the Wood.

Hinata bounced his leg impatiently, the wind in his ears. “How come Daichi sent me to you? Have you done it? Put an AI back in their body?”

“Yeah,” said Oikawa, “I have.”

Hinata stared at him, wide-eyed. “And?! Are they okay?”

Oikawa turned back to look at him. “Sure,” he said, the corner of his mouth turning up. “You just met him.”

Hinata stared at him uncomprehending for a minute, and then he said, “You mean Iwaizumi? But he said you didn’t know anything about it!”

Oikawa’s hands were tucked up under his arms like he was cold, or trying to keep them from shaking. He took a breath. “Because as far as he knows, I don’t.” He bit his lip, the smile not quite leaving his mouth but becoming something bitter instead. “He won’t remember, Hinata. You can have him back, but he won’t remember.”

Hinata swallowed. “Won’t remember what?”

“Anything,” Oikawa said, his voice harsh. “Anything you did together, anything you said, anything he might have felt or you _thought_ he—it’s not _real._ It’s this—gossamer, this spider-silk fantasy you weave and then when his mind goes back to his body, the flesh takes over.” He shook his head. “As far as Iwa-chan is concerned, he went into the tube one day and woke up three years later from a coma induced by a botched AI procedure, everything else, it’s all—gone.”

“But,” Hinata protested. “But why—why lie about it? Why not just tell him?”

“Tell him what? That even though he doesn’t remember it, he lived inside my head for almost three years? That even though he doesn’t remember, I do?” Oikawa’s mouth was sardonic, but there was something wrong with his eyes, something that made Hinata want to shiver—an edge, a fragility, a crumbling cliff above rushing water. He watched Oikawa lick his lips. “That when we were one, he loved me?”

_If he loved you from inside your head he must really love you in the first place, with all your shitty thoughts to deal with,_ said Kageyama bluntly. _He just doesn’t know you want him to._

Hinata blinked. _That’s a little mean._

 _Say it,_ Kageyama said firmly.

Hinata swallowed and repeated it, haltingly, to Oikawa. The older hunter stared at him for a long moment, and then he burst out laughing.

“Um,” said Hinata, going red, “sorry—“

Oikawa shook his head. “He’s not wrong,” he said, “About the shitty thoughts, anyway. The rest—“ he stopped and stared away into the distance, where Iwaizumi had disappeared. “I—“ he swallowed, and when he spoke again it was only to Hinata, somehow; the direction and tenor of his voice changing to something almost private, hunter to hunter. “Do you ever feel, sometimes, that your thoughts and his are—mixing? That maybe you’re influencing him? That some of the things you hear from him are just echoes, and not generated from his brain at all?”

Hinata thought about that. “Sometimes, I guess?” he said cautiously. “But he always corrects me, and he’s got a pretty different voice, so.”

The edges of Oikawa’s mouth turned up. “I guess he would,” he said. “Tobio-chan’s always had a really good sense of how to draw lines between himself and other people.”

Hinata frowned. That was one of those compliments that if he thought about it long enough it might actually be an insult instead. Kageyama brushed it off, tangibly; said _you’re scared you made him love you._

Hinata made a face. “This would be a lot easier if you guys could talk directly. Reason number like a thousand that we should get your body back, Tobio-chan.”

>Don’t call me that, Kageyama snapped, and Hinata laughed.

Hinata expected Oikawa to laugh along with him, but instead he was just—staring. “You still want to do it? You still want to bring him back, even though he won’t remember?”

Hinata hesitated. “Just ‘cause it happened that way for you doesn’t necessarily mean it would happen that way for us, right? One case doesn’t prove anything—“

“It’s not one case,” Oikawa interrupted, his face baffled, and then it cleared. “Oh,” he said, “ _oh_ , you don’t—I was wondering why you came to me when you could have saved yourself all the trouble of travel.”

Hinata blinked at him, and Kageyama said, _tell him to stop, this isn’t his call._

 _No,_ said Hinata immediately, _sorry, way too curious._

 _Hinata,_ Kageyama warned, and Oikawa leaned forward to put his chin in his hand. “You really didn’t have to come all this way,” he said. “You could have just asked Shimizu-san.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG. LOVE YOU.
> 
> also there's no Noya section this chapter bc it would've thrown off the pacing & he was with Hinata the whole time, but! Expect more Noya next time. Also....someone else...???


	6. Chapter 6

Shimizu slid her feet slightly further apart on the branch in order to keep her balance as the wind shifted hard to the east. She breathed deep, tasting rain, and ran the fingers of her left hand over the fletching of the arrow nocked in her bow.

She kept her eyes unfocused as she scanned the underbrush below. It was easier this way—she could see movement without being distracted by the details of any particular tree or outcrop of rock. It had been a long time since she’d had to be this alert, and the adrenaline made the hollow point behind her ear ache.

She didn’t miss it, she told herself. If she did it would be an easy fix—she could go inside and talk to Sugawara and have Ennoshita in her head within a day, join the ranks of her fellow hunters and be whole the way they were. But she hadn’t, because. She missed something, but it wasn’t the feeling of another mind alongside her own.

A branch cracked to her left and she swung that way, drawing her bow in a smooth motion that she barely had to think about. 

“Don’t shoot!” a wry voice called, and Kuroo stepped from behind a tree, his hands above his head. 

Slowly, Shimizu lowered her bow.

“You know,” the tall hunter said, approaching her tree, “if you had an AI you would have known I wasn’t a threat.”

Shimizu stared down at him. “That or you would have an arrow in your throat already,” she said, her voice coming out cooler perhaps than he deserved. 

“C’mon,” he drawled, squinting up at her. “Is that any way to talk to a fellow hunter?”

Shimizu relented, un-nocking the arrow and returning it to the quiver at her hip. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve got some questions,” he said, “and I hear you might have answers.” He beckoned her. “Come down to my level, I’m not used to looking up at people when I talk to them.”

Shimizu sighed and swung herself off the branch, dropping to the ground at his side. “Fine,” she said. “My shift’s over, anyway, I have to switch with Yachi and watch Natsu.”

“You guys are on high alert,” he remarked.

"Kageyama's been in contact with Ennoshita," she said. "We know what's out there."

"Interesting," Kuroo shot back, "because Hinata came face to face with the thing and he has no idea what it is. "

Shimizu pulled the tie from her hair and shook it around her face. "I misspoke,” she said. “We—Suga, Daichi and I—know _that_ it’s out there. What it is is another story.”

Kuroo cocked his head. “Why don't I believe that?”

Shimizu raised a shoulder in a shrug. “That’s not a question I can answer. Nor, most likely, are your others.”

She began walking through the Wood, back towards camp. Kuroo rambled along at her side, a weird, too-long creature made of ropy muscle and deceptively lazy eyes. “If you haven’t told your lovely Yachi what’s going on,” he said casually, “what does she think she’s on watch for?”

“The hunters returning,” Shimizu said calmly, “or any small game that crosses our borders that we could catch or trap without AI.”

Kuroo chuckled, but it was mirthless. “And when she sees something else entirely?”

“She won’t.” Shimizu turned sharply on her heel, fixing him with a look that—to her satisfaction—stopped him in his tracks. “And you will say nothing to her.”

Kuroo stared at her for a moment, appraising, and she returned his gaze. Though she no longer had the support of another voice in her head, her body remembered the easy readiness of swift action, remembered where and when to strike. She wondered if Kuroo was weighing the odds of taking her down, like she was him.

Maybe he did, or maybe Kenma could, or maybe he just decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, because he relaxed and then touched his forehead like a tiny salute. “As you say.”

Shimizu smiled at him and lead the way.

Hinata’s childhood den was the remains of a little stone cottage. When his mother had been alive she had rearranged the fallen walls and reinforced the roof so that it was smaller, almost womblike, just large enough for herself and her children to sleep curled up in together. Shimizu loved it here—It had always reminded her of a badger’s warren, or the den of a bear, and it was absolutely the best place to stay dry in a storm. 

When she pushed back the ragged curtain of fabric and leaves her heart squeezed tight in her chest. Natsu was sleeping, her head pillowed on Yachi’s knee. The girl was sitting propped up against the wall of the den, her head slumped to one side as she also dozed. She had one hand on Natsu’s head and the other on the book that lay open in her lap.

Shimizu smiled softly and knelt, allowing herself the small pleasure of taking in the unguarded way Yachi slept, the way the blond strands of her hair fell across her face, the little wrinkle between her brows. The disquiet that had taken root in her heart when Kuroo showed up at the edge of the camp vanished, pulled out of her by the sweet, peaceful rise and fall of Yachi’s chest, the untroubled parting of her lips.

She was doing the right thing. She would not risk this again.

She reached out to touch the curve of Yachi’s cheek, then drew her hand back when she heard Kuroo step through the curtain behind her and curled it around Yachi’s shoulder instead, gently shaking her. “Yachi,” she said softly so as not to wake Natsu as well. “Wake up, it’s your watch.”

Yachi came awake with a start. “What?” she said, a little too loud, and then panicked and shushed herself, shaking her head. “Shimizu-san—sorry—I—“

Shimizu smiled helplessly at her. “No need to apologize,” she said quickly. “Let’s see if we can move the little one without waking her, hm?”

Yachi nodded, and they both slipped their hands under Natsu’s head, lifting her gently. When they’d set her down again on the furs and fabrics of the bed Yachi squirmed out past Shimizu and Kuroo, who gave her a grin.

She returned it, kind of bemused. “Hi,” she said, “sorry, who are you?”

He twiddled his fingers at her. “Kuroo Tetsurou,” he said, “from Nekoma.”

“Oh!” said Yachi, and looked from him to Shimizu and back. “Are you here to help while our hunters are away?”

Kuroo looked at Shimizu. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I suppose I am.”

Yachi smiled. “Thanks,” she said, “it’s really nice how we help each other out.”

“Yachi,” said Shimizu, because she could see Kuroo’s temptation to say something suspicious, “your watch.”

Yachi nodded and saluted her, a much more sincere and vigorous echo of Kuroo’s laconic gesture. “Right!” she said, and jogged off.

Shimizu leaned back against the wall of the den and stared down at Natsu’s sleeping face.

“She looks just like him,” Kuroo said, something soft and strange in his voice, and Shimizu looked up at him sharply. She hadn't thought Kuroo and Hinata were particularly close; to her knowledge, they’d barely met. But there was an odd sadness to Kuroo’s face as he gazed down at Natsu, something almost wistful.

He bent down and picked up the picture book, turning it over in his hands. "This is Akaashi's work."

Shimizu tucked her hair behind her ear. "Yeah."

"He made this when he was barely bigger than her," Kuroo said, nodding to Natsu. "You know half the stuff in here is lies, right, Bo just started making shit up and Akaashi wrote it down?"

"I know," Shimizu said, smiling at him. "The entry for the giraffe says that 'when threatened, the giraffe can shoot poison from its eyes'."

Kuroo grinned at her, his eyes crinkling up dark. "Do you know that's not real? I don't know that's not real." He traced his long fingers over the detailed ink-wash of a dolphin, curling up out of sketchy half-formed waves. "It's a crime this boy ever gave up his hands."

Shimizu watched him. There was something up, other than the heightened watchfulness in them all—his shoulders tensed against something he didn't like, but it wasn't anything she'd done. No hostility, just wariness. "I'm sure Bokuto agrees with you," she said drily, eyes on his face.

He flashed her a smile, but usually an opening like that yielded much more flirtation. Instead he shut the book and handed it back to her. "Where'd you get it?"

She stared him down, cool, composed. "Yachi brought it back for Natsu when she spent that harvest there."

Kuroo narrowed his eyes at her. "Interesting," he said, "because Bo says he doesn't know her. In fact, he says it doesn't make any sense for you to send her to them at all that year, their harvest sucked."

Shimizu bit the inside of her cheek, but raised an eyebrow as calmly as she could. "You're going to trust Bokuto's memory over mine?"

Kuroo crossed his arms. "When it concerns food?" he drawled, and then, more seriously, "when it concerns the safety of his quadrant? C'mon.” He shook his head. “I don’t trust his memory more than yours, but I sure as hell trust his word.”

Shimizu tossed her head. "I don't want to talk to you about this," she said firmly. "There's a lot you don't know."

Kuroo stared at her, eyes suddenly hard. "Yeah," he said, "I'm starting to get that." He leaned carefully over and placed his hands on either side of Natsu's head, covering her ears, and then looked back at Shimizu's face. "You know Hinata nearly _died_ a couple days ago."

Shimizu tightened her mouth at him. “I know.”

Kuroo stared at her. “Do you? Were you there? Did you pick him up out of a pool of his own blood? Kenma had to rebuild him from the inside out, did things to him we can _never_ reverse. You wanna know what that felt like?” He lifted a hand away from Natsu’s head to touch himself behind the ear. "You've still got that empty port and Kenma would be more than happy to show you.”

“Stop,” said Shimizu, trying to keep her voice steady. “You're not going to change my mind.”

“Why the hell not?” Kuroo demanded, too loud, and Natsu sat up with a gasp. Shimizu glared at Kuroo, who at least had the decency to look guilty.

“Shimizu-san?” Natsu asked, rubbing her eyes. “What’s going on?” She blinked at Kuroo. “Who are you?”

Shimizu reached for her, smoothing down her wild hair. “This is Kuroo,” she said, “he's a hunter from another quadrant,” and then, prompted by the thought of Kuroo’s face when he'd first seen Natsu, “and a friend of your brother.”

Natsu’s eyes went wide. “A hunter,” she said. “So you have a friend in your head like Onii-san & Noya?”

Kuroo swallowed, the same strange look in his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “And we’re both very pleased to meet you, Natsu-chan.”

Natsu smiled sleepily. “I can't wait until I'm old enough to have a friend in my head too,” she said, letting Shimizu press her gently back into the furs and blankets. “She can keep me company always and show me pictures of animals, real pictures, not just the drawings in my book.”

Shimizu exchanged glances with Kuroo, who saved her from voicing any of her thoughts by making a face at Natsu. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t insult those drawings, a very dear friend of mine worked hard on them.”

Natsu gaped at him. “You know Kei-chan?”

Kuroo’s eyebrows flew up. “Kei-chan?”

“He signed it,” Shimizu said softly, reaching out to turn the book over in his hands, “or at least started to.”

The cover of the book was rough birch bark, not pressed and smoothed like the rest of the pages. In charcoal characters meticulously traced it read: ANIMALS, by KEIJI A.

“Bo probably distracted him,” Kuroo said quietly. “Stole his charcoal or something.”

Shimizu nodded, her eyes on what she could see of his face, noting the fondness there, and the terrible grief.

Natsu sat up, all weariness gone from her bright eyes. “Can I meet him? I wanna meet him! Can you get him to come visit?”

Kuroo stared at her. “Uh,” he started.

“I'm afraid that’s not going to happen, “ Shimizu cut in smoothly. “He's gone very far away, and we don't know yet when he'll be back.”

“Oh,” said Natsu, her shoulders dropping. “Well when he's back can you tell him to come visit? I drew him some squirrels.”

Kuroo barely hesitated before nodding. “I will,” he said, nothing in his voice betraying the emptiness of the promise. “You know, when you said Kei-chan, for a moment I thought you meant the other Kei you know.”

Natsu blinked at him, and then burst into a fit of giggles. Shimizu assumed it was at the thought of calling Tsukishima “chan” until Natsu said, still chuckling, “Tsukishima-kun can't _draw_.”

Kuroo let out a bark of laughter like a fox. “Of course he can't,” he said, shaking his head. “What an idiot I am.”

Natsu looked at him sideways like she was sharing a great secret. “Nii-san says that his head-friend calls him _Tsukki_.”

Kuroo’s eyes widened delightedly. “Does he? That's fascinating.” He held out his hands to Natsu. “Does Tsukki ever give you rides on his shoulders, Natsu-chan?”

Natsu scrambled to her feet. “No! Can I?”

Kuroo lifted her up under the arms and stepped out through the curtain. “You just gave me some serious ammunition, kid,” he said. “Consider it a thank you.”

“So tall!” exulted Natsu as Kuroo swung her easily up and settled her on his shoulders. 

Shimizu stepped out through the curtain after them. “Careful,” she called. “Smells like rain.”

“I hope so,” Yachi said, coming up from behind her, and Shimizu turned to look at her. She'd put her hair up, pulling it back from her face, but it wasn't quite long enough to stay, wisps and strands of it escaping to echo the curve of her cheek, touch the corner of her jaw. She smiled, and Shimizu could almost feel the shape of it in her mind. “My crops need it.”

Shimizu smiled back at her, fighting to keep it from turning sad. "Your watch?" 

"Tanaka took over for me, I think he's not really gonna be able to sleep until Hinata & Noya are home. " Yachi nodded at Kuroo, who was maneuvering himself under an apple tree to let Natsu stretch up and pluck the apples.”They’re getting along well.”

Shimizu nodded, a little bemused. “Kuroo’s playing it up,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s for me, or for Natsu.”

Yachi cocked her head at her. “Who, then?”

Shimizu watched as Kuroo paused for breath, his eyes flicking left and unfocusing, like he was concentrating on something in his own head. “I think it's for the Cat," she said.

Kuroo turned his head carefully to look up at Natsu. "When Tsukki gets back," he said, "you should ask him to play this game all the time."

Natsu hesitated. “He won’t wanna.”

Kuroo grinned. “Who knows,” he said. “He might surprise you.” He caught Shimizu’s eye. “He's out there searching for something, and somehow I think he might be changed by what he finds.”

+

Tsukishima woke to suffocating darkness, unable to move.

It wasn't that his limbs were restrained, or numb. His limbs were gone—his lungs were gone—the urge he got to cough or gasp or scream or even breathe slammed up against something like a glass wall, or a, a severed electrical connection, no place for his fizzing panic to go. He was a desperate bodiless thing in a space he instinctively experienced as dark, if only because he had no eyes to see the light.

 _Tsukki_. Yamaguchi's voice shivered through him, flung at him from every direction at once. Grounding him, calming him, even as it shook every scrap he could still call self. _Concentrate. Keep yourself together._

He tried, and here where he was nothing but will _trying_ was the same as _doing_. Slowly the darkness lightened, a little—slowly, he saw a source of that light. It was himself, sitting where he’d been against a stone pillar choked with vines, his legs crossed and his eyes closed and—Yamaguchi, he realized, in his head.

He glanced down and was almost unsurprised to see his own legs in that same flickering, ghostly watercolor that Yamaguchi had been. 

_I’m not strong enough to move your body much,_ Yamaguchi said, apologetic, as Tsukki watched his own eyes open, flicker, focus, _but—oh. You. You’re beautiful._

The thought was unintentional—he could tell because it wasn’t directed to him, it was just. Sitting in the air around him, reverberating from the invisible walls of Yamaguchi’s mind. He wanted to shrug it off, but he had no shoulders; wanted to scowl but he had no face. There was nothing to do but—accept. Be caught between the warmth and longing of the compliment and the warmth and longing in himself and. Feel.

It was too much. It was suffocating. It rolled over him in waves of emotions that weren’t his own, pushed and pulled at things that were his, only his, not meant to be touched or shared. He reached out a thought like a lifeline before it swallowed him up completely, tore him apart with its simultaneous inward and outward force. _Yama—please—I can’t—_

 _Sorry!_ Yamaguchi said immediately, and the not-world around Tsukki quieted, calmed, let him breathe. _Sorry, Tsukki, I’m not used to it being this way ‘round._

Tsukishima still felt—shaky. Like a newborn fawn. The thought made part of Yama’s brain laugh—quiet and unobtrusive–even as Tsukishima said to the rest of him, _god, do I do that to you?_

He saw his own shoulders shift in the smallest of shrugs. _Not often,_ Yamaguchi said, casual, like it was no big deal. _Not anymore. We worked it out._

 _Yamaguchi,_ Tsukishima said, _I’m sorry._ He meant for himself and he meant for this world that had struck him down, made him into this helpless, shifting thing that could not stand on its own.

 _I’m not,_ Yamaguchi said, and it was only partially a lie—the truth was in the whispers under it, the _I’m glad that I’m here,_ the _I’m glad it was you._

Later, Tsukishima told himself, they can pretend that his immediate _so am I_ was drawn out of him against his will, a product of his lack of control. 

For now, he let it go, and focused on looking around him, at the world filtering slowly into corporeality. The place remained the same—the same wide, circular space in the center of a ring of archways, the same uneven steps. The same rectangle of steel set into the center. The same resonant, prowling dread.

But the foliage was gone. The archways were free and clear, the stones of the floor free of moss and wildflowers. Where there had been tree roots cracking the steps they were whole. The sun was low and orange, casting long shadows across the white stone.

 _How_ —Tsukishima started, and Yamaguchi said, _this is when it happened._

Tsukishima turned back to look at him, but he was gone. His body was gone–the pillar of the archway empty. Tsukishima looked around wildly, becoming one sudden flash of panic, his whole self flaring with it, until Yama’s voice—shaky but grounding—brought him back. _It’s okay,_ he said, _it’s okay. You just can’t see you because you’re not here yet._

 _I’m not_ —Tsukishima started, and then he heard the scream.

Unexpected noises were commonplace for hunters, but they were almost always accompanied by Yamaguchi’s immediate identification, a flare of color in his vision that said _fox,_ that said _night bird,_ that said _an owl has made a kill._ This was a scream without sight, a human scream, and the air around him shivered with Yamaguchi’s fear.

It had come from below the trapdoor, not yet rusted shut, that lay at Tsukishima’s not-quite-real feet. _You’re not here yet,_ Yamaguchi said again, _but I am._

Tsukishima—moving to the beat of Yamaguchi’s memory—bent to open the hatch.

The stairway below was lit with the same solar-powered wall-sconce lights that lit the baths under Karasuno, and Tsukishima-as-Yamaguchi followed them cautiously downward. _I’m sorry,_ Yamaguchi said, _but this is the only way I could think of to show you what happened—I can’t face it on my own, but maybe with you I can retrace the memory._ His words were brave, but thin. The light around them warped and shook, and Tsukishima concentrated, pushing together all the scraps of reassurance and courage he had and holding it out in a mental hand.

There was a feeling like a great, determined breath in, and the light around him steadied.

He slid down the stairs and along a low, door-lined corridor. Yamaguchi drew him onward, past where the baths would be if this were Karasuno, around a corner into a different corridor that sloped downward in a smooth curve. There were long grooves scraped in the floor, stained dark. _It’s okay,_ Tsukishima felt/heard Yamaguchi tell himself. _It’s just prey-blood from the food we carry down here._

It hadn’t made Yamaguchi feel any better then, and it didn’t make Tsukishima feel any better now.

“Hello?”

Startled, Tsukishima tried to look around, but Yamaguchi sent him a spark of feeling that was almost amusement. _That was me,_ he said, _then._

A second “Hello?” echoed from the past, and this time Tsukishima—felt it, the nervousness to say anything, the self-reproach when his voice came out so thin, so shaky. His head was full of reassurances not his, things Tsukishima knew were false that Yamaguchi then had not: there was nothing wrong. He’d made it up. There was nothing down here—everyone was at dinner, they’d brought in enough for the week, the scream had been a fox or a bird away in the woods—

He rounded a bend in the corridor and stopped. Ahead of him the floor of the corridor terminated in a metal landing and a sheer drop. Long chains set into rings in the stone ceiling led downward into the darkness.

 _Wrong,_ said the memory. _Wrong, they shouldn’t lower it til tomorrow. The elevator should be up—_

The chains shook and rattled. Fear closed around him like a tightening fist. He wanted to run, get himself free of the trap he knew was waiting to be sprung, but the memory kept him rooted. Tsukishima snarled against it, a wolf in the mind of a rabbit, frozen in the hunter’s sights. _Not real,_ Yamaguchi was saying, thin and far away. _Not real, not real, not real—_

Shapes like shadow made flesh hauled themselves up the chains of the elevator. Two of them had a third figure strung between them, flesh startlingly pale in the darkness. Blood and the burn-rot of the creature’s skin crawled down its arms, dripped down its chest. To his left the creatures started to swing on the chains, throw themselves forward with rattling staccato grace to land on the elevator platform, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the struggling figure. With a pathetic, sideways lurch, the thing that had once been a woman raised her head and met Yamaguchi’s eyes.

“Go,” she said, more gasp than word, the rot working its way inexorably up her jaw. “ _Run_.”

Yamaguchi—a whirlwind with Tsukishima at its heart—ran.

He made it up the slope of the corridor before they caught up with him. A fluttering touch, no more than the brush of fingertips against his back as they swarmed past him and onward up the corridor, but it was enough. His skin itself recoiled from it, not even pain so much as a revulsion so deep it manifested as such. Tsukishima felt flesh split over his spine like rotting fruit, his legs collapsing out from under him and sending him sprawling on the cold corridor floor. His mouth was open, but if he was making noise he couldn’t hear it—his ears were too full of the unbearable acceleration of an already too-fast heart. Agony shivered through him with every thunderclap beat, shaking him and shaking him as he was torn apart.

And then something grabbed him—real him, the bits of him that were only inhabiting this pain, not the owner of it, and tugged it backward and out into a numbness so complete he could barely call it awareness at all. Quietly—so quietly it took him a minute to recognize it was happening, Yamaguchi said, _I remember that part, we don’t. Need to repeat that._

Tsukishima reached for him, all desperation, all primal need, all lungs struggling for air, but Yamaguchi didn’t take him back, didn’t seat him in his own brain again. _Not yet,_ he said. _It’s not over yet._

He did something, and Tsukishima felt the coldness of the floor again, felt crawling, blistering heat spreading from his back and down his shoulders, wrapping up and around his throat, but at a distance, like Yamaguchi-now was keeping him free of the worst of it, or Yamaguchi-then was only semi-conscious. Suddenly he was being lifted from the floor by hands that didn’t burn, human hands, and then he was moving—carried, slung over someone’s shoulder. He was dimly aware of steps under someone’s feet, of underbrush, of trees rushing by as the person carrying him started to run. Dimness, light, dimness again, darkness, and then the coolness of moss against his back. From where he lay, Tsukishima-in-Yamaguchi stared up at the broad face of his rescuer. The boy was tall, with brown hair tied back from his face and exhausted brown eyes. He sank to his knees next to Yamaguchi, reaching out to someone unseen. “Please,” he begged. “Please, help me. I think—I think he’s dying.”

The last thing Yamaguchi saw with his own eyes were the faces of three children. A boy and a girl with dark hair, and a second boy with hair like an overcast dawn. They peered down at him in concern.

In a circular, overgrown ruin at the very center of the Dome, Tsukishima opened his eyes and spat a hoarse curse at the darkening sky.

+

 _He does look okay,_ Asahi acknowledged, _though you can tell he had more muscle when he went under than he does now._

Nishinoya peered at Iwaizumi. He was stocky and still very well-built, with wide shoulders and a chest almost as broad as Asahi’s, despite the difference in height. But Asahi was right—the curve of his stomach was too concave for his ribs, his ribs themselves too visible. _Why doesn't Oikawa want him to know? Even if he doesn't remember, can't he just tell him what they did?_

He felt Asahi hesitate. _I don't think it's what they did that Oikawa can't or won't tell him. I think it's how it felt._

Noya frowned. _What do you mean?_

Asahi went warm with a kind of affectionate embarrassment that Noya wanted to curl up inside and never leave. _Could, um. Could you describe me and, and us, to someone who has never had an AI?_

Noya licked his lips. _Me and us,_ he echoed without really meaning to, his mind bumping those concepts up before they faded with the rest of the thought. He tried to fold mental hands over it, block his surprise and his hope from Asahi, but his AI stopped him, blazing with almost defiant embarrassment. His mental hands on Noya’s mental wrists, delicately forcing them both to feel in full.

 _Asahi,_ Noya started, _I—_

“Yo!” Iwazumi snapped his fingers in front of Noya’s face. “Stop spacing out and help build this shit.”

Noya shook out his hands, resisting the urge to punch Iwaizumi in the mouth. Asahi had pulled back like a startled deer, and when Noya flung out a little tendril of _hey, c’mon,_ he let it curl around him but bounced back a vague _later_ that did nothing to calm the crazy nervousness in Noya’s stomach. “Fine,” he said shortly. “I. Yeah.” He crouched down to wrap the crossed sticks at his feet with twine, fastening a corner of the stretcher.

Iwaizumi gave him an unimpressed look, bending to fasten his own corner. “I forgot how fucking frustrating it is working with hunters who have AI. Heads in the clouds, the lot of you.”

Noya looked at him curiously. “You guys don’t have paired hunters?”

Iwaizumi shook his head. “Not since the Kageyama transferred to your tiny redhead friend.” He bit his lip. “We had—plans,” he said shortly, “but I guess we didn’t know what we were doing well enough.” 

Noya tied off his knot and moved on to the last corner. “But how do you make your quota?”

Iwaizumi shrugged. “Matsu and Makki are basically in each other’s heads anyway, and I can’t really see either Kyoutani or Yahaba giving up their physical form any time soon.” He wrinkled his nose. “Besides, who would they pair up with? Each other? That’d be like trapping a cat and a dog inside the same skull. We probably do better without.”

In the back of Noya’s head he could hear Hinata and Kageyama exchanging rapid-fire thoughts, but he didn’t catch much of it. “But you did try,” he pointed out.

Iwaizumi stared hard at the ground. “Yeah,” he said. “I tried.”

Noya could feel Asahi slowly start to uncurl. “Why?” he asked, directing the question he most wanted to ask inwardly outward instead. “What made you do it?”

Iwaizumi straightened up, stretching to pop his back. “I was needed,” he said, and then, more quietly, “I _thought_ I was needed.”

Before Noya could press him further he gestured at the stretcher on the ground—deer skin slung between two long branches, approximately the right length to carry the body of the slain creature. “Come on,” he said. “I don’t know where the fuck Matsu and Makki got to, so we’ll have to do this ourselves.”

“That is an advantage of AI,” Noya pointed out. “We pretty much always know where our people are.”

Iwaizumi made a noncommittal noise and picked up his end of the stretcher. Noya did the same, following him through the woods and back toward the lake. 

The sky was clouding over by the time they got there, slate-grey, and the wind shifted uneasily through the rushes at the lake’s edge. Iwaizumi stopped and set his end of the stretcher down, scowling upward. “We should work fast. I don’t know what’ll happen to this thing if it gets rained on. With our luck it’ll, like, dissolve, or some shit, and then its toxic sludge will be in all our drinking water.”

“Oh yeah,” said Noya,”Kageyama said that this was the main source of water for you guys.”

Iwaizumi gave him a weird look. “You talk to Kageyama? I figured you had that kid from Central in your head.”

Noya stopped dead. Somewhere in the back of his head, Asahi went, _oh, no._

Noya opened his mouth, and then closed it. His head was buzzing with questions, but he couldn't tell if they were better directed inward or outward. For the first time since they'd left Karasuno, he missed Ryu with a sharp and sudden ache, missed his steadiness and his silliness and his unfailing ability to make the world make sense again. 

He ran a hand through his hair and then asked, carefully, “Central?”

Iwaizumi was still looking at him, his eyebrows pulled together over his eyes. “Yeah, the central quadrant? There was that cave-in there years ago and those two kids were the only survivors, and one of them was hurt real bad.” He grimaced. “They came to _your_ quadrant for help. What, did you sleep through the whole thing?”

Noya stared at him. “I—I don’t know, we weren’t told any of this.”

Iwaizumi blinked at him. “Seriously? But the injured kid, your scientists making him into an AI to save his life is the whole reason we know you can make AI and don’t just have to rely on the ones we had from the old days. Kageyama, the Cat, the Owl over in Fukurodani—they all made their choices after you guys told them they could. You seriously don’t know any of this?”

“Seriously,” echoed Noya, feeling numb and disbelieving. 

Iwaizumi shook his head. “Well, think it over, but do it while move this thing—I was serious about the rain.”

Noya bent down to take one of the poles of the stretcher in his hand and worked with Iwaizumi to drag it over to the corpse of the creature. Laying it as flat as they could, they started slowly working it under the thing, sliding the deer skin between the ground and the creature’s flesh. Up close the stink of burnt flesh and diseased blood was inescapable, and as the mangled corpse shifted across the deer skin it left a red-black smear that make Noya’s stomach churn.

He did his best to ignore it, focusing on all the new information he had to process. Tsukishima had been right—there was a fifth camp, a central one, and some years ago everyone there had died. Not, as Iwaizumi seemed to think, from a cave in, but from creatures like this. The injured boy must have been Yamaguchi, but—

“Iwaizumi,” he said, and Iwaizumi looked up from meticulously tugging at the stretcher, keeping his hands well clear of the thing’s flesh. “You said that there was another boy? From Central?”

Iwaizumi nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “He was a little older, I think. Apparently he saved the injured one, ran for like two straight days with this dying kid over his shoulder. No one knows what happened to him. I assumed he just stayed with you guys, but if you don’t know anything about it...”

Noya shook his head. “No, I have no idea—”

He stopped, suddenly—maybe because he’d been missing him—remembering something Ryu had said, standing ankle-deep in a river silver with moonlight. _It’s funny, actually. I mentioned that you said he was a coward, and Suga got really mad at me._

Noya swallowed. _Asahi._

Asahi said nothing. In his memory, Ryu continued, _It was kinda scary, he went all quiet and he was, like, glaring, and his mouth got all tight and pinched, and Daichi had to calm him down._

 _Asahi,_ Noya said, firmer. _Stop playing me my own memories and talk to me._

The memory got less vivid and overwhelming, and then Asahi was reluctantly there alongside it. Finally it faded, leaving just his AI, curled in on himself, silent, waiting.

Noya couldn’t really even figure out how to phrase the question, but he didn’t have to, just offered up all the jumbled-up pieces of confusion and desperation and awe and guilt and hurt in one tangle of _was this you, why did you let me call you a coward, how did you survive, why didn’t you stay human, why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you—_

 _Because I don’t remember it!_ The force of the thought cut through Noya’s knot of questions cleanly, a blade sharpened on frustration and disappointment and a low, self-directed anger that Noya had never felt from his AI before. _Because I_ am _a coward. Yamaguchi didn’t forget. Yamaguchi has it all there in his head all the time, deals with it, can handle it, and he suffered so much worse than I did, but I—_ Asahi cut himself off with a bubble of pure bitterness. _I was too scared, and I had them take it out._

Noya frowned. _You what?_

 _Takeda and Ukai_ , Asahi said, almost weary. _When they made me into an AI, I had them erase my memory. Of central, of all of it—I don’t remember anything before I came to Karasuno._

Noya gnawed on his lip. _But—you knew about Yamaguchi—_

Asahi sighed, the feeling sliding down Noya’s spine into his toes. He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or terrified that Asahi felt so close, in a moment like this. _Sugawara told me,_ he said. _He told me about finding me, collapsed on the edge of camp, and the creatures, and Yamaguchi, and what happened, but that’s all second-hand. Everything I actually experienced is gone._ He was still curled in on himself, all guilt and sorrow and a kind of bleak resignation—Noya had misread it before as disappointment, but it was a slightly different flavor: not just disappointment in himself, but an absolute certainty that Noya would be disappointed, too. _Nishinoya,_ he said, and that, too, Noya felt to the soles of his feet. _I’m sorry._

 _Asahi,_ Noya said, and ached with it. _Asahi, Asahi—you’re not a coward. Your whole family, your whole camp was killed—you saved Yamaguchi, if not his life then at least his, his soul, no wonder Ryu said Suga was mad at me, hell, I’m mad at me, I should never have said any of that shit to you. Leaving those memories behind wasn’t cowardly, I can’t even imagine—_

 _Stop,_ said Asahi softly, but fervently enough that Noya’s thoughts actually stopped. _I was a coward, and I am a coward. Because—because Kageyama says Iwaizumi doesn’t remember because the flesh takes over, the memories that you actually experienced with your real meat brain erase the AI memories, which means my body—my body still remembers that, and I. Nishinoya._

Noya felt dread pool in his stomach. _Don’t say it. Please._

_I’m sorry,_ Asahi said again. _I can’t do it. I can’t face remembering._

 _No,_ Noya insisted. _We’ll figure out a way—we don’t know that this is the way it always works—_

“Nishinoya!” Iwaizumi snapped. “Wake the fuck up, it’s starting to rain!”

Noya blinked open eyes he hadn’t realized he’d closed and found that it had—his shoulders were damp with it, and the raindrops hissed where they hit the creature on the stretcher. He bent to pick up the stretcher, his hands shaking. 

Asahi sent him a tendril of something—apology, maybe, but it didn’t matter. The very tentative nature of the thought made his whole mind flash hot with helpless fury, and without letting himself think about it he shoved Asahi away and slammed his walls up hard.

“Come on,” he said to Iwaizumi, hauling the creature’s corpse upward. “Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guess who's still alive and working on this
> 
> no hinata section in this bc it didn't work out pacing-wise but don't you worry, you'll see him more next time


	7. Chapter 7

Hinata watched Oikawa watch the rain. It started slow but gained speed fast, the patter of individual droplets hitting leaves soon merging into a solid, growing roar. It was like the world itself was creating a sound-proof barrier around them, a small dry silent space inside a wet, thunderous world, a space for the speaking of secrets.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, for probably the third time— _fifth,_ Kageyama supplied, but it was more sheepish than anything else. “ _Yachi?_ As an AI? But she’s so…” He gestured, his hands forming fluttery motions sort of like bird wings, sort of like flames. “She’s so Yachi.”

Oikawa shrugged, his eyes still on the world outside. “I’ve never met her,” he said, “but maybe that’s why it didn’t work, and she had to come back into herself. Sometimes the mind can’t handle melding with someone else’s, especially if it has a strong connection to its original body.”

“I thought she went away for the summer,” Hinata said, frowning at his hands. His palms were rough and dirty, bits of bark clinging to them. He brushed them off, suddenly longing for the sunken baths under Karasuno. It seemed like a thousand years since he’d been there—seemed like a different him, a him that lived in a world that was simple. Carefully, falsely simple. “Why tell us she was in Fukurodani? Why would Suga and Daichi lie?”

Oikawa finally turned to look at him. “Suga and Daichi?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Not Ukai and Takeda? Not Shimizu herself?”

Hinata bit his lip, thinking back to what he’d seen in the lab, and as he did so Kageyama helpfully pulled up the memories in his head—he hadn’t been there, really, but the part of him that was nothing but computer had remained, the little CPU in the base of Hinata’s AI socket, and that spun the images in Hinata’s mind’s eye: Daichi and Suga, their heads together, arguing heatedly. _Fine, on your own head be it,_ Daichi had said, and Suga, weary, strange, resigned: _Isn’t it always?_

“I don’t know,” he said, “but—”

The images abruptly vanished, and Kageyama said, sounding confused, _Yamaguchi’s back._

Hinata blinked. _What do you mean?_

_I mean,_ Kageyama said, his confusion now tinged with annoyance,  _that he’s back. He was gone, and now he’s there again. I think—_

Something in Hinata’s mind gave a little twist—a knot coming undone, the turning of a doorknob—and then Tsukishima said in a voice like the snip of scissors through hair, _Meet me back in Karasuno._

He was gone as abruptly as he’d arrived, a touch that almost wasn’t, and Hinata brushed a hand across his face, surprised to find it wet. Grief—deep and alien—welled into the place Tsukishima had so briefly occupied, coiled in a lump in his throat, bumping against his confusion.

“Hey, kid,” Oikawa said, starting up from where he sat, “are you okay—what’s going on—”

_Sorry,_ Kageyama murmured, and the grief faded. _I don’t really know what that was—Yamaguchi—_ he trailed off into little flashes of thought, little pings of _death_ and _pain_ and _discovery,_ bouncing gently off each other more like they were his own questions, not answers to Hinata’s.

Hinata rubbed his eyes harder, waving Oikawa away. “I’m fine,” he said, swallowing against nothing. “It’s not—they’re not my tears.”

Oikawa’s eyes sharpened. “Tobio-chan—”

Hinata glared at him for Kageyama, because his AI was too distracted. “Don’t call him that,” he snapped, so tired of being confused that it was easier to be angry. “You’re the reason he’s got such a bad reputation, just because you two couldn’t get along everybody thought he was hard to work with, and he’s not, he’s great!”

Oikawa stared at him. “You really believe that,” he said.

“Of course I believe it,” Hinata shot back. “We have better sync than anyone else at Karasuno, and he—he cares about me, and he has my back, and when we make him human again I’ll have his!” He gnawed on his lip, his eyes starting to well up again, this time with frustrated tears of his own. “And—and when we make him human again he is _not_ going to forget me!”

In his mind Kageyama—quietly grateful—slipped mental fingers through his.

He expected Oikawa to step back from him, or wave him away, or laugh, but he advanced, instead, shouldering his way into Hinata’s personal space, forcing Hinata to stare up at him. “He doesn’t know you at all,” Oikawa hissed. “That _thing_ in your head, that’s not Kageyama Tobio. You’ve never known Kageyama Tobio, no more than I have. That thing in your head is _you,_ your desires, your wishes, your vanities, augmented with a computer and mixed up with a shredded, patchwork personality stolen from a boy who thought he could help his people. The moment you put him back in his body, Kageyama - the Kageyama you know - will be gone _,_ and you will _never_ see him again.”

Hinata’s back hit the den wall.

_He’s wrong,_ Kageyama whispered, but he was shaken, his grip on Hinata’s mental hand uncertain. Somehow, that made Hinata feel better. Oikawa was wrong—Kageyama needed him to be wrong, so he was wrong.

Feeling something pressing into his back, he reached a hand around to discover what it was, and found his fingers tangling in the necklace he’d seen earlier, the one with spiral shells. He unhooked it from the wall so it wouldn’t jab him in the back anymore. “If AI are just your wishes,” he said, easing back just the slightest bit more now that he had the space and absently slipping the necklace into his pocket, “how come you didn’t wish for Kageyama to be nicer to you?”

Oikawa continued staring down at him, nostrils flared, for a long moment filled with rain. Finally he looked away and stepped back, his jaw tight.

Hinata slipped past him. “I’m going back to Karasuno,” he said, pausing at the doorway, and then, “I’m sorry about Iwaizumi.”

He swung himself out into the rain, having to correct—by instinct and Kageyama’s wordless guidance, if those were even different things—for the surprising, thudding weight of the water. Oikawa’s den-tree was an old, rough-barked oak, and he was on the ground without incident, turning his face to the sky and running his hands through his hair. _This is one way to get clean,_ he thought at Kageyama, more to coax him out of hiding than anything.

_You seem so certain,_ Kageyama replied, his mental voice still shaded soft—not tentative, really, but porous, like soapstone.

_Of course I’m certain,_ Hinata said, blowing rainwater out of his face and running his hands down his neck and over his arms, letting the rain wash away the grime of his travel since he left Karasuno, the cloying remains of his brush with death, the lingering weight of Oikawa’s words. _It’s bullshit. How could you be me? You’re nothing like me, and even if you were like me—look, like I said to him, if you’re me then you must previously have been him, right?_

_I guess,_ Kageyama replied slowly.

_Are you saying you accept the idea that Oikawa made you up, just because he said so?_

Kageyama sent him a thought like a happy glare—red and glancing, sunset-light off a lake, and Hinata laughed aloud. “Good,” he said. “Now connect me up to Noya and let’s go figure out what’s up with Tsukishima.”

There was a slight pause, and then Kageyama said, a little puzzled, _Asahi’s not saying much, but he showed me where they are at least._

Hinata found Noya and Iwaizumi in a lean-to near the edge of the lake. He jogged up, then stopped, his feet dragging as they caught up with his eyes. They were sitting on opposite ends of the lean-to, as far apart as possible, because between them, cradled in a stretcher, was the creature.

Hinata expected dread to close around his heart, expected the scent of pine in his nostrils. But he felt nothing. Maybe because dead it looked so unreal - a thing of rotten wood, maybe, or corroded metal, not of flesh - or maybe because the rain still pounded against his skin, implacably reminding him of the wild joy of being alive, but the prickling, humming feeling of imminent danger was gone.

Noya saw him, hopping to his feet. “Hinata!”

Hinata rolled his shoulders against the rain and closed the distance between them. “Hey, Noya-senpai.”

Noya raised his eyebrows, looking him over. “You’re gonna take, like, _days_ to dry.”

Hinata grinned at him. “You should come out here,” he said, stopping at the edge of their lean-to and leaning his arms and forehead against it, enjoying looking further down than usual at Noya. “It’s nice, it cleans you off. Plus, I was tired of talking to Oikawa-kun.”

From the other end of the lean-to, Iwaizumi snorted.

Hinata turned to look at him. He was sitting cross-legged, his hands loose on his knees, watching the creature. Hinata suddenly remembered the necklace in his pocket. “Oh,” he said, “hey, will you give this back to him? I kinda, um. Accidentally stole it.”

He tossed the necklace to Iwaizumi, who grabbed it out of the air easily. “Sure,” he said, opening his hand to look at it. He frowned, turning it over in his hands. “Oikawa had this?”

Hinata nodded, watching him. “Yeah,” he said, “hanging in his den tree. Why?”

Iwaizumi hesitated, then shook his head. “Nothing,” he said at last, and tucked it into his jacket. “You’re leaving, huh? Sticking me with this thing?” He indicated the creature at his side.

Hinata cracked his neck. “Sorry,” he said. “We’ve gotta get back to Karasuno, and there’s no way we can take it the whole way. I’m sure Oikawa will help you get it below to your scientists when the rain stops.”

Noya peered doubtfully at the rain. “You want to leave for Karasuno now?”

“I don’t, but Tsukishima seemed pretty insistent,” Hinata replied. “You didn’t hear him?”

Noya gnawed on his lip. “I’m not, uh. Letting Asahi in right now.”

Hinata felt Kageyama’s bubble of surprise merge with his own, lifting his eyebrows high. _That doesn’t really seem wise,_ Kageyama muttered, and Hinata floated him a little nod of agreement. Before he could figure out how to say so aloud, though, Noya was stepping from the safety of the lean-to and into the rain.

“Whatever, right?” he said, the cheerfulness in his voice ringing transparently false now. “Tsukishima says go back, we go back. Maybe he found what he was looking for.” He kept going, walking straight past Hinata and swinging himself effortlessly up into the trees.

“I think he did,” Hinata confirmed, and raised a hand in farewell to Iwaizumi before following. The sadness Tsukishima had left in his wake had not tasted of confusion.

He stuck close to Noya for a while, much closer than he would have normally. The rain made talking impractical, but after an hour or so of watching Noya move just a little clumsily, bark his knuckles on branches or fight to clear his eyes of water, Hinata called, “you know, this is how I almost died.”

Noya’s shoulders tensed, and he dropped to the pine-soft floor next to him. “Running through the pouring rain under orders you don’t understand while everything you thought you knew collapsed around you?”

Hinata shook his head, though he knew Noya wasn’t serious. The rain was starting to drop off, anyway. “Cutting myself off because I didn’t want my partner seeing my thoughts.”

Noya slicked his hair back from his face. It made him look younger, smaller, lost. “That’s not why,” he said, matter-of-fact. “I don’t want to see his.”

“Why?” Hinata asked, before thinking about whether it was a good idea.

Noya bounced on the balls of his feet. “Maybe Oikawa’s right,” he said. “Maybe better we don’t bring them back.” He gave Hinata a tight smile like nothing he’d seen on his face before. “Kageyama seems to be the only one who wants to try, anyway.”

Before Hinata figured out how to respond to that, Noya was jogging away again.

Hinata followed, giving him some space in case he needed it. _What’s he mean?_ He asked Kageyama. _Why wouldn’t Asahi want his body back?_

He felt Kageyama shift uncomfortably within his mind. _I don’t know,_ he said, _but if Oikawa is right, maybe it has something to do with memories? Asahi isn’t,_ there was a feeling like a deck of cards being shuffled, Hinata getting little mental glimpses of _complete_ and _full_ before Kageyama gave up entirely and sent him something like _not-missing._

_He’s not not-missing?_ Hinata asked, confused. Kageyama only echoed his confusion back at him like they were playing catch.

Hinata sighed. The rain was letting up—storms never lasted long, here, the weather following the same protracted cycles of growth and death that the rest of nature did—and the sun was coming out, filtering through the dense pines in pale, yellow-silver shafts, making the puddles Noya splashed through ahead of him shine like dropped pieces of moon. It unhooked Hinata from time and a little from place, like he was suddenly hyper-aware of the constructed nature of everything surrounding him, from the trees themselves—planned, planted, on some distant-past day—to the plug behind his ear, to the rules that told him what he could and couldn’t know.

_Kageyama,_ he said, _was Yachi really an AI for a summer?_

Kageyama offered him an affirmative like it was a flower, colored with his relief to finally be talking about this. _I don’t know much of what happened,_ he said. _She was only sporadically in contact with us, and it was always really hard for her._

_Why?_ asked Hinata again, this time meaning _why was it hard_ and _why don’t you know_ and _why did she choose to do this._ He scooped up that last meaning and repeated it. _Why did she choose to become an AI?_ and, inevitably, allowing the beads of thought to pass through his mental hands, one after another, _why did Asahi why did Kenma_ and the pendant at the center, _why did you?_

He could feel Kageyama organizing his thoughts again, trying to contain them in some kind of linear fashion, contain all the emotion and causality of three years of secrets into something legible to either of their minds. _A year and a half before we met, my mom died._

Hinata blinked, but tamped down his surprise so as not to knock Kageyama out of his careful linearity. _She was a hunter,_ Kageyama continued, _with one of the original AIs - the first generation, the ones who remembered being alive before the walls went up, before the world ended._

Hinata kept one eye on Noya with an effort, reminding himself he had no AI to do it for him. It was hard, though - he wanted so badly to put himself on autopilot and just listen.

A little tendril of Kageyama wound around the story to say, _It’s okay, I’m watching him,_ and Hinata had just enough time to touch back a warm and honest _you’re amazing_ before the rest of Kageyama continued. _She would tell me stories sometimes,_ he said, _passed on to her by her AI._ Images rose up in Hinata’s mind, unreal and sketchy, like a child’s drawing: an impossible city, cold grey buildings reaching up like bare pines toward the yellow-rayed sun. A wide, dizzyingly wide beach with a sky the color of peaches and waves the color of sky.

_She wouldn’t talk about what happened,_ Kageyama said, and the images crumbled, leaving thought-dust thick on Hinata’s tongue. _To everything. To everyone. I’m not sure her AI even told her. But she would talk about what it was like, before, and when she died it was like that whole, that whole world died with her._

Hinata, acting on instinct, pushed gently outward and inward at once, entered Kageyama’s room in his mind, filling it with as much warmth and sympathy as he could. He felt it steady him, felt Kageyama accept it like physical support, like an arm around his shoulders.

_They tried to take her AI out when she died and give it a new host, but something went wrong - the plugs are supposed to be self-sustaining, right, they’re—we’re supposed to have enough energy reserves of our own to survive for a while, otherwise they could never take us out for updates and stuff. But._

He lost his tight grip on his thoughts for a second and Hinata was looking down at his own hands, but thinner, cupped around a cylindrical AI plug. The lights lining it were dark, and Hinata felt - cold, and incredibly alone.

The image blinked away and he was back, jogging through a dripping green forest grown dark. Noya was hopping up a rocky slope to his left, and then without a word dropped off the other side of it.

Hinata yelped. “Noya--” He scrambled up the slope after him, peering over the edge of the cliff to find Noya looking up at him from a ledge maybe five feet below, pushing his wilted hair from his eyes.

“There’s a cave,” he said. “I thought we could sleep here.” He bit his lip. “In shifts?”

Hinata slid down to join him, looking at him sideways. They hadn't slept in shifts since they were kids, sneaking out to explore the Wood. It wasn’t necessary, once you had a partner on eternal watch. “Sure,” he said. “Yeah, of course.”

He ducked into the cave. It was small - too small for bears - but it was good to check for foxes and badgers and stuff anyway. He felt Kageyama messing with his vision and then the darker corners lightened, revealing nothing but old leaves and a few mushrooms that Hinata recognized as both non-lethal and pretty tasty.

He gestured inside. “Go on,” he said. “Get some rest. I'll take first watch.”

He expected—hoped—that Noya would refuse, would insist he couldn’t sleep, would burst open with whatever was going on with him and Asahi and they could work it all out. But Noya just gave him a look that was part gratitude, part despair, and curled himself up small in the back of the cave.

Hinata sighed and gathered up the mushrooms, shifting through the leaves as quietly as he could to find dry twigs and sticks. He built a fire slowly and carefully at the mouth of the cave, striking his flint against the handle of his knife and watching the flames lick into life, echoed large in shadows on the cave walls.

He slid his knife back into its sheath on his belt, touching the two empty spots for his others. It hadn’t even occurred to him to retrieve them from the bodies of the things they’d killed by the lake. Getting that close had seemed—probably had been—out of the question. Takeda would frown at him for losing them, or more probably just look worried. Good steel was hard to come by.

He roasted the mushrooms on spits over the fire while Kageyama uncurled from where he’d been quiet, consumed with memory or maybe trying to talk to Asahi. Hinata waited for him to speak, feeling for once like he couldn’t—shouldn’t—push.

_Six months after my mom died Ukai came to Aobajosai with an offer, and I thought—I had a choice,_ Kageyama said. _Live out an empty life, caught in this weird, looped, pointless world. Or step outside myself and make sure I got back the world my mom described. The real world. The outside._

Hinata watched the flesh of the mushrooms shrink and darken, their moisture dropping, hissing, into the fire. “Kageyama,” he said aloud, but softly. “Do you want your body back?”

He’d asked, before; or at least he’d felt he didn’t need to, because the answer had been so clear—in Kageyama’s longings, in his frustrations, in Hinata’s own inability to understand not wanting to feel rain and wind on your face, sand between your toes. But he’d been touched by a loneliness years in the making, and suddenly the question was impossibly important. Suddenly he understood what Kageyama might be giving up.

The warmth of the fire caressed his jaw, pushed upward by something invisible, unreal. _Yes,_ said Kageyama, and there was no embroider-tangle underpinning of a lie.

+

“You knew him.” Tsukishima stared hard at the wall separating Daichi and Suga’s section of the lab and the section beyond, where he knew there were pods keeping Kageyama, Asahi, Ennoshita alive. All of them except. “You knew him,” he said again, “you knew he was dead, and you let me—you let me find out the same goddamn day I found out that he could ever have been _alive._ ”

Above, on the raised platforms with their desks, Ukai and Takeda were sitting, messing with some older closed circuit televisions. Suga and Daichi were standing near him, but not too near, like they were afraid he’d set traps around his feet, as if he weren’t the one who had walked into a trap they’d set for him years before.

Suga watched his face, his tongue shifting over his lip. “Wasn’t easier?” he said softly. “Not knowing?”

“ _No,_ ” snarled Tsukishima. “No!”

Daichi looked between them, shifting forward as if to say something, but decided against it.

There was a pillar, in Tsukishima’s mind, cylindrical and heavy and angry and hot, and it stretched from the base of his spine to the very top of his head. It kept him upright. It made his eyes ache. He could feel Yamaguchi curled around it like—something, something from one of Yachi’s stories, a serpent coiled around a tree, around an egg, silk-soft and comforting but threatening any moment to break through. He knew, he could feel in his shaking fingers that when the pillar crumbled it would take his spine with it. He hadn’t slept in two days.

“I saw it,” he said, speaking too quickly. “I saw it, what happened to him, I felt it. Those creatures. They—they killed Yamaguchi, and you _knew,_ and now they’ve nearly killed Hinata, too.” He reached out, his fingers catching in Suga’s shirt almost more out of chance than intention, and clung. “How many others? How many others we thought were lost to accident or storm or disease?”

“It’s a good question,” said a voice, and Tsukishima turned as quickly as his body would allow to see Kuroo ducking through the doorway, followed by Hinata and an oddly subdued Nishinoya, and behind them Shimizu and a confused-looking Tanaka. “I think we’re entitled to some answers, don’t you?”

Tsukishima followed his gaze. He wasn’t looking at Suga and Daichi, to his surprise, but at Ukai and Takeda. The former drifted around to the front of his desk and leaned there, one ankle crossed over the other, his arms crossed, his face unreadable. The latter straightened with a sigh. “I suppose you are.”

He picked something up from his desk and pushed his glasses up his nose. They never stayed—cobbled together from two different pairs—and he could never wear them for longer than a few hours without getting blistering migraines, but without them he was blind as a bat. “Alright,” he said, “let’s see if this works.”

He pressed a button on a remote and the map of the Wood that Suga and Daichi used to track wildlife appeared, except—Tsukishima blinked at it, and he heard Hinata mutter, “what the—” because it was _clear,_ no longer an unreadable shifting mass of light projected disorientingly on stone but a legible map, the boundaries of the four quadrants clearly marked. Tsukishima saw the symbols for the buildings of Nekoma, Fukurodani, Aobajosai, and Karasuno; the symbols for the supply tunnels overlaid on topographical markings of hills and valleys, lakes and streams. And—there, in the center, more buildings. More supply tunnels. Tsukishima clenched his fist to rid it of the memory of cold steel under his palm.

“This is how you always knew where things were?” Hinata demanded.

Suga looked apologetic. “We had to scramble it so you wouldn’t see—well.”

Takeda cleared his throat delicately. “This,” he said, “is the Wood.” He looked around for a minute, then gave a little “ah!” and grabbed a stick from where it was leaning against a pile of boxes. He tapped against the stone wall where each of the supply tunnels were, including the one in the center. “Populated only by the young, the bright, the enterprising, a food source for the rest of humanity.” He adjusted his glasses again, not exactly nervous, but not exactly calm, either. His voice was its usual almost-laughing good humor, but there was something else, too, something that caught and clung and cloyed to Tsukishima’s skin like spiderwebs. “A humanity that we told you we had lost contact with almost twenty years ago. That isn’t, precisely, true.”  

He paused, his gaze dropping to the ground. When he spoke again, all of his humor was stripped away, the only thing left that strangle, subtle undertone, which resolved itself into an absolute and wearied despair. “We made contact with them once, ten years ago. If you can call it contact. For that matter, if you can call what they are _humanity_.” The end of his stick drifted again toward the center of the map, but he didn’t look up from his intense study of the floor. “They came up through the supply tunnels in Central.”

Tsukishima heard Hinata say in a stage-whisper, probably to Nishinoya, “Tsukishima was right!”

He felt Yamaguchi’s coils tighten, felt the edges of his pillar begin to crack, its plaster flaking away.

“They killed,” Takeda continued, still in that same weary tone, “all of the hunters and foragers stationed there, except two.” He hit another button and two pictures flashed up on the screen. Tsukishima heard Noya give a little _oh,_ the first noise he’d made since arriving, but his attention was entirely on one of the two portraits. A boy with light brown hair, feathered across his forehead, his smile easy and almost relieved. “Azumane Asahi,” Takeda said, indicating the other portrait. Tsukishima continued to stare. His jaw pointed, almost delicate. His short, upturned nose dusted with freckles. Takeda’s pointer tapped his cheekbone, breaking Tsukishima’s trance. “And Tadashi Yamaguchi.”

Takeda ran a hand over his face, picking off his glasses. “They also killed every hunter—every _fighter—_ we sent to try and help.” He swallowed hard. “Hinata, your mother. Tanaka’s sister. Nishinoya’s father—” he stopped. “But we managed to seal the tunnels, stop—those things, whatever humanity had become in our absence, from spreading further.”

“Hang on,” said Kuroo, frowning. “Why stop there? And why not tell anyone what had actually happened? The risk—what if they came through the other tunnels and no one knew what the fuck they were?”

Takeda put his glasses back on his nose, crooked. “That possibility—” he started, and then stopped, wincing. “We believed that possibility was very remote.” He brought the map back up so it was side by side with Asahi and Yamaguchi’s faces, circling some lines running outward from the symbols that indicated the supply tunnels. “None of these are connected,” he said, “nor do they lead to the same place. That’s to prevent disaster such as flooding, and in case some food comes back bad, they can isolate the disease and prevent a major outbreak. We thought—we thought this was maybe just a problem with one of the places we supplied, and it was possible the food was still being taken by healthy people at the other sites.” The corner of his mouth curled upward. “Seems we were wrong on at least two fronts there, huh.”

“I still don’t get why you didn’t tell us,” Hinata piped up. “About—about any of it, especially since the other hunters knew, or—or some of them, Kuroo knew the AIs were people, at least—”

“Iwaizumi knew that Asahi’s from Central,” Noya broke in.

Takeda took a breath, setting down the stick, but before he could answer Ukai shifted, unfolding his arms. “Hope.”

Takeda let out his breath.

Ukai tucked his hands into his pockets. “What were we supposed to tell a bunch of sixteen year old kids, excited out of their minds to have cool mental companions, even more excited to have a purpose? Shut the fuck up and go through this exercise in futility with the rest of us, because more than likely the rest of humanity’s dead and we’re it?” He shrugged, a jerky, bitter thing. “We knew you’d find out eventually,” he said. “We knew you’d be angry. For a day, maybe even a week. Seemed a small price to pay for a few years of happiness.”

No one seemed to know what to do with that. Finally Suga spoke up. “I know it’s a lot,” he said. “For my part of it, I’m sorry for lying to you all, but I’m not sorry for giving you what we did. What you want to do with it—” Tsukishima felt Suga’s gaze linger unbearably on him before moving on to the others, “—is entirely up to you. But for tonight I suggest we all go back up to the surface, get some food, and process.”

Takeda smiled at him. “Wise as always, Sugawara.”

Ukai uncrossed his ankles. “Well,” he said, “you heard the man.”

Everyone started shifting, as if uncomfortable with taking orders from people who had lied to them but unsure of what else they were supposed to do. They started filtering back out of the room. Ukai held out a hand to Takeda, who took it; they stood for a moment, just looking at each other, a silent checking-in that Tsukishima had felt but never seen displayed in two bodies. They started descending from the platform, and he looked away.

“I have more questions,” Kuroo called in warning, and Hinata said darkly, “ _lots_ more.”

“I would fear something was wrong if you didn’t,” Takeda said, his hand still linked with Ukai’s.

Tsukishima lingered, drifting up past the desks to stare at the pictures that remained on the wall, drawn to them, inexorable.  He was almost—almost caught too much in this face, this real person, not a conjuring of his mind, not a creation of whatever madness that he was currently teetering above, a real, human boy, separated from him by nothing but time—almost too focused to feel Yamaguchi take a breath, almost too lost in the rushing in his ears to hear him say quietly, _they killed me too._

_I know,_ said Tsukishima, the pillar cracking in slow motion, shards of plaster, marble, sanity falling around his shoulders, and then, _what?_

_They killed me too,_ Yamaguchi said again, louder, somehow both more certain and more uncertain than he’d ever sounded. _Tsukki, they killed me, too, why would he include me in the two that survived—_

“Takeda,” Tsukishima said aloud, and Takeda stopped, halfway out the door. “Why would you say he survived, he _died,_ he felt— _I_ felt him die!”

Takeda looked back at him, then at Daichi. Daichi looked at Suga, who looked back, smiled very slightly, and nodded.

“Not quite.” Daichi stepped up behind Tsukishima. “I’m not sure I would qualify this as good news, so don’t get your hopes up, but. I have something to show you.”

He held out a hand. Hesitantly, Tsukishima took it, stepping gingerly from a circle of stone-dust and bone.

+

“Um. Hey.”

Shimizu looked up from smoothing down layers of wood pulp on the scrap of metal she used to make paper and found Tanaka peering in through the door of her den. “Tanaka-san?”

He slid sideways through her door, looking embarrassed. “Can I ask you a kind of weird favor?”

Shimizu narrowed her eyes at him. He was often playing pranks, and she - when Yachi was involved anyway - was a frequent recipient. But there was none of the vibrating mischievous tension she was used to seeing in him when he was about to, say, lead her to a secluded clearing to be pelted with giant slugs. Instead he looked genuinely hesitant and genuinely, deeply worried.

He huffed a laugh at her look. “I know,” he started, but she stood up, cutting him off, and wiped her hands on her scrap of towel.

“Of course you can,” she said, and smiled.

He blinked at her. “Oh,” he said. “Well - well wait til you hear what it is, you might not want to and that would be completely fine, it's really okay—”

Shimizu just looked at him, waiting.

Tanaka licked his lips. “It's - I need to talk to Asahi.”

“That seems like a favor from Nishinoya-kun,” Shimizu said slowly.

Tanaka winced. “Right,” he said. “Normally, yeah. But if things were normal I wouldn’t need to talk to him in the first place.” He sighed, leaning against Shimizu’s makeshift table. “Asahi’s not in Noya’s head anymore. He swapped him out for Ennoshita.”

“What?” Shimizu asked, startled. “Why?”

Tanaka blew out a frustrated breath. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Shimizu doubted that - there was no one who could read Nishinoya like Tanaka could, even when he didn’t want to be read.

Tanaka ran a hand over his short-cropped hair and continued, “All I know is, he swapped Asahi out pretty much as soon as he got back from Aobajosai and we all had that big meeting and we learned—you know, that everything we thought was true was a lie. And now he’s all weird, like he was when he first got the surgery, quiet but not in a, a Noya-and-Asahi way, just quiet, and when he’s not quiet he snaps at me, and he says it’s just because he’s getting used to a new AI but I ain’t dumb.” He met Shimizu’s eyes and repeated, quieter, “I ain’t dumb.”

“I know,” Shimizu said, because she did. She sank into a crouch almost absently, rebalancing her weight physically as an attempted shortcut to rebalance her mind. “You want me to put Asahi in my head so you can talk to him.”

Tanaka watched her sink down and then mirrored her, looking concerned. “You don’t have to,” he said, but she could hear how much hope there was behind it. “I could always ask Hinata or Tsukishima but. Tsukishima would just say no, and I don’t blame him, he’s got enough trauma going on in there without me adding Noya’s stuff to it.”

Shimizu slid her hands in to her hair, shaking it away from her scalp, trying to feel less weighted down. _Don’t I?_ she thought, and then chided herself. _Can’t expect sympathy when you refuse to show anyone your pain._ “ And Hinata?” she asked, her voice coming out cool out of habit more than choice. She stared hard at the polished floor of her den.

From the corner of her eye she saw Tanaka shifted from a crouch to sitting cross-legged, trying to look at her face through her hair. She didn’t look back. “Hinata’s too close to it,” he said. “I think he’d, like - interject, change what Asahi says. You’d be the most, like, impartial translator.”

Shimizu hadn’t had Yachi in her head for two years but there was still a tiny computer there, at the back of her AI port, the little node that received the consciousness given. It gave her just the slightest bit more perception - sharper hearing, sharper eyesight - and she could hear it when Tanaka swallowed, could hear the nervousness in it. “Besides,” he said at last. “I think—I think if it’s you on the outside, maybe I could understand an aspect of what Noya feels about him that I’ve been, uh, strugglin’ with.”

Shimizu finally looked at him, saw the pink in his cheeks. “I see,” she said, though she didn’t, really. “I—” she worked the words around in her mouth for a while, and then settled on, “I’m not sure it would—be good for him.”

Tanaka frowned. “For who? Noya?”

Shimizu shook her head. “Asahi,” she said. “There’s—” she closed her eyes. “There’s a chance that what happened with Yachi happened because there’s something wrong with me. With my head.”

It was the first time she’d spoken it aloud, or even put precise words to the creeping fear she felt every time she considered taking another AI. Tanaka didn’t even let it hang in the air long enough for her to properly hear.

“Bullshit,” he said, immediate and absolutely certain.

She opened her eyes. “What?"

“Bullshit,” he said again, easily, shifting forward. “Look, I might not know what it’s like to have someone else in my brain, and I might have only found out you had Yachi in yours like a week ago, but I know you. You’re smart, and organized, and kind, and you always make space for people, like, to be _them,_ the inside of your head is prob’ly as welcoming as every other space you make, and anyone in it would probably feel as good as it always feels, bein’ around you.” He stopped, flushing, like he’d caught himself saying something he shouldn’t be. “And—and more than that, I know Noya and Hinata and Tsukishima and there is no way in the Wood that the inside of your head is worse than theirs.”

_I’m sorry,_ Shimizu heard Yachi say, through layers of memory like water. _I’m sorry, I have to go, it’s—it’s like being in a room where the walls are closing in on me but the walls are made of_ you _and if I push back I’ll hurt you. I’ll hurt you._

_You won’t,_ Shimizu insisted to a ghost she hadn’t seen in years. _You won’t._

Here, now, she licked her lips and looked at Tanaka, unsure.

He stood up. “Okay,” he said, his voice tired in a way she’d never heard him - even when exhausted Tanaka was cheerful . “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. There’s, there’s reasons you don’t have another AI, I get that, crossed a line.”

She watched him cross to her doorway and then turned her eyes to the floor again, fighting the urge to cry.

“Kiyoko-san,” Tanaka said, and she looked up. He was standing in her doorway, his hands loose at his sides. “I saw Yachi when she came back from that so-called field trip. When she was “sick”. What happened to her—” he shook his head, eyes fierce. “You didn’t do that to her. You couldn’t have.” He took a breath, his eyes fierce. “I think it fucks you up, this whole thing. I think it makes you do shit to your brain we’re not meant to. I think it makes you need people in ways we’re not meant to need. I think there’s a lot—a lot of assumptions that because you can feel what people are feeling you know why they’re feeling it, and I think the feeling of it makes you think it’s your fault, that you caused it some way. But you didn’t. You didn’t, and Noya didn’t, and I’m gonna make both of you see that.”

He turned around and swung himself out of her tree.

Shimizu stared at the light that remained on her doorstep, golden purpling into sunset. She took a breath, then another, running her hands over her face.

When she dropped out of a tree next to Tanaka he yelped. She shook her head, privately pleased to have retained her ability to move silently so well, and pushed the shadows from her mind. “So,” she said. “Shall we?”

After a long, wide-eyed moment, Tanaka grinned.

They wandered through the trees in silence for a while. The clouds were moving in with the setting of the sun, making the remaining light shift around them in odd, flickering arcs. There would be rain within the hour. "Tanaka-san."

He looked sideways at her. "S'up?"  
  
"What do you think of—all this?" She struggled to put what she meant into words, and then, wry, quoted his own back at him. "You know, that everything we knew was a lie."

Tanaka blew out a breath, turning to look up at the sky. "Well," he said, "on the one hand, it's not like I really thought I'd ever see anything but the inside of the Dome anyway, you know? But it does feel different to know that like—no one else, will, either. That we're alone out here, rather than, like, part of something."

Shimizu nodded. "Yeah," she said. "It does."

"Still," said Tanaka, stretching his arms upward with a sigh. "I'm glad to know the truth."

She raised her eyebrows. "Why?"

"Lies are all—shifty," he said. "Not gonna jump far if you try'n push off a lie. When you're standing on somethin' true, maybe you can go somewhere from there. Do somethin' about it."

"What kind of something?" Shimizu asked.

Tanaka scowled. "Dunno yet," he said. "S'part of why I need Noya back so bad. So he can help me figure it out."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *arrives a literal year and a half late* did someone order like 6k words of exposition


End file.
